
Class. 
Boot 



Copyright 'N?_. 



COFVR1GHT DEPOSIT. 



THE MODERN THEORY 
OF THE BIBLE 



BY 



SAMUEL A. STEEL, D.D. 



MANSFIELD, LA. 



They have Moses and the prophets ; let them hear them." 

Luke 16, 29. 




New York 



Chicago 



Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 

L 1 I 



Copyright, 1921, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



Printed in the United States of America 



MAR 11 "22 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago : 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London : 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 



©CI.A654882 



FOREWORD 

THE Bible is not in danger. A book that has 
survived the attacks of its enemies and the 
mistakes of its friends for thousands of years 
is immortal. But false views about the Bible, that 
tend to destroy our faith in it as the revealed word 
of God, are fraught with great danger to the indi- 
vidual, society, and the nation. This sort of error is 
like undermining the foundation of a building. It 
is our duty to combat it, expose its fallacy, and drive 
it away. 

The tap-root of the modern theory of the Bible is 
Rationalism, or the principle that everything is to 
be understood in the light of human reason. This 
gave rise to the evolutionary conception of history, 
which excludes the idea of Providence. Knudson 
says : "In the early part of the eighteenth century 
the Italian jurist Vico (1668-1744) made the theory 
of man's gradual development out of a barbaric state 
basal in the science of history. But the principles 
he laid down did not come to be fully appreciated 
until almost a century later ; so that it is only during 
the past hundred years that the idea of evolution has 
been employed in a strictly scientific way to the re- 
construction of ancient history." The application 



6 FOREWORD 

of this theory to the interpretation of the history of 
Israel abolished the old distinction between "sacred" 
and "profane" history, and put the history of the 
Jews on the same basis with the history of the 
Greeks and Romans. The Darwinian theory of evo- 
lution gave a scientific basis for this conception of 
history. According to the theory of Darwin, man 
is a developed ape. From a monkey he gradually 
grew to be a "man," passing in countless ages 
through the successive stages of "Paleolithic man," 
"Neolithic man," the "Cave man," the "Primitive 
man," until at last he emerged a civilised man. As 
such he invented the art of writing, and began to 
make a permanent record of events. Even after he 
became "civilised" in a measure, that is, began to 
wear clothes, and to notice things around him, and 
ask questions about them, he was for a long period 
of time in a state of childhood, believed in ghosts, 
wonder-tales, marvels, and "miracles;" so that the 
early records of all nations, the Jews included, con- 
sist of a mass of mythological stories, that have no 
historical value, except as illustrations of the crude 
and undeveloped life of the primitive people. 

Now it turns out that the Darwinian theory of 
evolution is false. I threw it overboard ten years 
ago. Not that I ever accepted it, except in that pro- 
visional sense in which every intelligent man accepts 
what is put forward by such men as Darwin, as a 
possibly new truth. I hold myself ready to accept 
all new truth, whatever sacrifice it may demand ; for 



FOREWORD 7 

truth is the life of the soul. Darwin's theory of evo- 
lution held absolute command of the intellectual 
world for half a century, and created the greatest 
revolution in the history of human thought. All de- 
partments of philosophy, history, science, and re- 
ligion were revised to harmonise with it. It was 
supreme. Fortunately for me, I was at the Univer- 
sity of Virginia when Darwin's epoch-making book, 
The Origin of Species, was winning its way first 
in this country, and sitting at the feet of a Gamaliel 
of science, Dr. Francis H. Smith, then Professor of 
Natural Science in the University of Virginia. 
From Professor Smith I learned two things that 
have been of infinite value to me all my life : first, 
not to give up an old belief until I was sure it was 
false; and, second, to take all scientific theories on 
trial. Like Dr. Smith, I held on to my old belief 
that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and gave us an in- 
spired account of the origin of the world ; and took 
Darwin's theory on trial. So I was not in the leaky 
vessel, and did not have to swim ashore when it went 
down, or send out an "S. O. S." for emergency res- 
cue from the waves of scientific unbelief. 

Ten or twelve years ago there appeared a book 
from the press of T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, en- 
titled, No Struggle for Existence — No Natural Se- 
lection. A Critical Examination of the Fundamen- 
tal Principle of the Darwinian Theory. By George 
Paulin. The book as far as I know made very little 
noise in this country; indeed the President of one of 



8 FOREWORD 

the leading Northern universities admitted to me that 
he had never heard of it, and intimated that the Dar- 
winian theory was so firmly established that to ques- 
tion it was to prove one's incapacity to discuss scien- 
tific subjects. He said that "Herbert Spencer was 
passing, but Darwin was here to stay!" On the 
strength of what I had read in Paulin's book, I re- 
plied that Darwin was here to stay as a great col- 
lector of facts, but that the day was at hand when 
he would be regarded as an obsolete interpreter of 
facts. Ten years have hardly passed, and science 
has discarded the Darwinian theory, and confirmed 
Paulin's judgment of its utter baselessness. "It ap- 
peared to me," said Paulin, "that an elaborated the- 
ory whose fundamental and vivifying principle was 
a demonstrably false assumption must itself, when 
examined in detail, be found to be an extraordinary 
concatenation of weird concepts, of sins against logic 
and common sense, of criminal violations of Na- 
ture's known laws, and of audacious and indefens- 
ible assertions. My investigations proved it to be 
so, a rotten tenement tottering in its every joint — 
a ship tumbling helplessly on the brine, leaking at 
every plank." 

I had been standing on the Rock of Ages watch- 
ing the crazy craft tossing in the waves, and now 
saw the planks spread, and the ship that promised 
to carry us across the deep gulf between man and 
the lower animals go down in the fathomless depths. 
And with it went down the evolutionary conception 



FOREWORD 9 

of history based upon it. There is a vast deal in 
the Old Testament that cannot be reconciled with 
this theory, such as the lofty monotheism and sub- 
lime ethical teachings of the Pentateuch. To har- 
monise the Old Testament with the evolutionary hy- 
pothesis, the Higher Critics invented the theory of 
the late origin of the Pentateuch. They arbitrarily 
take all that is inconsistent with their theory of man's 
evolution out of its natural order, and assign it to a 
late date. And it is all conjectural. They have no 
positive proof. In his tract, The Menace of Dar- 
winism, Mr. Bryan stresses the point that Darwin, 
and indeed all who hold his views, made large use 
of the word "probably." The same criticism applies 
to the modern view of the Old Testament. Some 
chapters of a recent book that discusses the origin 
of the books of the Old Testament could hardly have 
been written without a liberal use of the words 
"probably," "perhaps," "it seems," "it is likely," and 
similar terms that indicate the uncertain nature of 
the statements made. Yet these statements are made 
with a dogmatic assurance as if they were unques- 
tionably true; and on vague and purely conjectural 
grounds they lift Moses out of his seat of authority, 
strip him of all his medals, and leave him so naked 
that he needs some of the fig leaves from the myth- 
ical Eden to conceal his shame! 

Fifty years ago, Christleib, then an evangelical 
preacher in Germany, sent out a note of warning 
that this destructive view of the Bible was being 



io FOREWORD 

taught in the German universities, and predicted that 
when it filtered down to the masses there would be 
trouble. We have seen what the trouble would be. 
Speaking broadly, the World War was the result of 
infidelity — the legitimate fruit of the Rationalism 
that dealt with the Bible simply as profane history. 
Rationalism killed the conscience of Germany and 
prepared the way for her "ruthless warfare," whose 
revolting atrocities shocked the civilised world. If 
we teach this Rationalistic theory of the Bible in our 
High Schools, and Colleges, and Universities, what 
do we do but travel the same intellectual road that 
led Germany to ruin ? How will we avoid her fate ? 
The Higher Critics who hold this modern theory 
of the Bible lean back in their professorial chairs 
with the smug conceit that they have the scholarship 
of the age on their side. Whoever differs with 
them stands self-condemned as incompetent to judge 
in such matters. Technical scholarship is one thing 
and common sense is another. A man doesn't have 
to be able to read the Code of Hammurabi in order 
to see the illogical reasoning of a vast deal of the lit- 
erary criticism of the Bible. A course in logic while 
they were studying Syriac would have been a good 
corrective of some of the errors of eminent schol- 
ars. According to their own admission, it is a ques- 
tion of probabilities as to who wrote Deuteronomy, 
except that it was not written by Moses. Their 
theory is that it is the "book" which was found in 
the rubbish of the Temple when it was being re- 



FOREWORD r 

paired during the reign of Josiah. The Higher 
Critics say that it was written by some unknown 
person, and hid in the rubbish of the Temple, and 
by this trick, they fooled the king into believing 
that it was the book of Moses that had been lost. 

Admit what they claim that it was the custom in 
those early times to attribute documents to famous 
people who did not write them, is such an origin of 
Deuteronomy "probable," looking at the question 
from the standpoint of common sense? After all 
the vicissitudes of Judah's history; after the apos- 
tate kings that had reigned over her; after the suc- 
cessive deposits of heathenism that had over-laid 
the original Mosaic teachings; and especially in view 
of the scarcity of books in that time, it seems to me 
not unreasonable that the book of the Law should 
be practically lost, and far more probable than that 
it was a forgery by some unknown priest. Admit 
the character of Moses, as the Bible, both the Old 
and New Testaments, give it to us, and the book of 
Deuteronomy might easily have come from his 
mighty mind ! On a balance of probabilities, I think 
any one whose mind is not biased by the fictions of 
the Higher Criticism will give it to Moses. One 
thing is especially noticeable about the modern the- 
ory of the Bible, and that is the comparatively low 
value it places on the Old Testament. This is a nat- 
ural result of the theory of its origin. 

It is impossible to have the same regard for myth- 
ology that we have for inspired history. No intel- 



12 FOREWORD 

ligent person claims that the books of the Bible are 
of equal value, or would give the same importance 
to Esther as to the Psalms, or say that the Old Tes- 
tament is as necessary to our spiritual life as the 
New Testament ; but those who hold the traditional 
view of the Bible believe that it is an organic whole, 
and that each book contributes a vital element of 
truth to the revelation it contains. The New Tes- 
tament is the unfolding of the Old Testament; and 
it certainly vastly enlarges our conception of Christ 
to discover that he was anticipated in the earliest 
experience of the race, and his redemptive offices 
and work set forth in a wonderful symbolism whose 
ritual of worship was intended to educate the Jewish 
people, and prepare them for the coming Christ. 
When Jesus told the Jews who were criticising him 
to search the Scriptures, and that they testified of 
him, he meant the Old Testament, for there was 
none of the New Testament in existence then. Our 
Lord's statement invests these Old Testament Scrip- 
tures with the highest value and clothes them with 
a sacred interest. For my part, I never feel like 
jesting about Noah and the Ark, or Jonah and the 
whale, since Jesus made such a serious use of these 
Old Testament incidents. According to the modern 
theory of the Bible, the Old Testament is a scaffold, 
and when the New Testament came, we had no fur- 
ther use for the scaffold. According to the tradi- 
tional theory of the Bible the Old Testament is a 
foundation on which the New Testament is built, 



FOREWORD 13 

and when you shake the foundation, you shake the 
whole structure. 

And this is just exactly what you do in the mod- 
ern theory of the historic origin of the Old Testa- 
ment as set forth by the Higher Critics. The very 
same canons of literary criticism applied to the New 
Testament make it a mass of unhistorical traditions. 
The Gospels become mythology, that is narratives 
that have a germ of truth around which there has 
accumulated a growth of fiction. The same reason- 
ing that makes the Adam of Genesis a "symbol," 
makes the Jesus of Matthew, whom Paul called the 
"second Adam," also a "symbol." The logic of it 
all inevitably gives you a Unitarian Christ, a Christ 
who was only a man, like the great Zoroaster, and 
the greater Buddha; a greater man than either, per- 
haps, but still only a man, and not the Divine Christ 
of the New Testament, in whom dwelt "all the ful- 
ness of the Godhead bodily." The Christianity that 
is to save this sin-cursed race is the Christianity that 
teaches the true divinity of Jesus. Unitarianism is 
a respectable cult, illogically teaching an ethical code 
whose highest sanction it denies; but what has it 
done, or is it doing, to save sinners! Its influence 
is a negligible factor in human history. The great 
river of salvation that has made glad the desolate 
places of the earth, and turned its deserts into spir- 
itual Edens, flows out of the Deity of Jesus ; and that 
doctrine rests on the historical veracity of the New; 
Testament. 



i 4 FOREWORD 

So the issue between the destructive and the con- 
servative criticism of the Bible is one of life or 
death. Truth is the conformity of thought to real- 
ity. Believing the Bible to be the inspired word of 
God, I have honestly devoted my whole life, now 
past three score years and ten, to proclaiming it to 
be the truth. I cannot say like Paul, that I gave up 
everything to serve Christ as my divine Lord and 
Master; for I had little to give. But I can say for 
fifty years I have unselfishly renounced all this 
world had to offer for the joy of preaching Jesus; 
and now in my age, and in honourable, apostolic 
poverty, I am happy both in the retrospect and the 
prospect of my life. But if the modern theory of 
the Bible is true, I have built on sand, and my spirit- 
ual deposits are as worthless as the bag of gold at 
the end of the rainbow ! 

In one of our large cities recently, some irre- 
sponsible person carelessly remarked that a certain 
bank in the city was unsound. It was one of the 
strongest banks in the city, and numbered among its 
depositors thousands of hard-working men and 
women who had put their little earnings in that bank 
for safe-keeping. The rumor spread, gathering 
force as it went, until the depositors began to get 
uneasy; then they wanted their money, and there 
was a rush for the bank. The big doors were closed 
to the surging thousands in the street, and strong 
policemen beat back the mob. It was not until a 
well-known business man in the city, in whom they 



FOREWORD 15 

all had confidence, climbed a telephone pole, and 
clinging to it, made the excited crowd a speech, as- 
suring them there was not a word of truth in the 
rumour of the bank's insecurity, that the people be- 
came quiet and returned home. If the modern the- 
ory of the Bible is true, the sooner we get our faith- 
deposits out of the fraudulent concern we call Chris- 
tianity the better. 

But, thank God, the theory is not only not true; 
its falseness is so evident that the wayfaring man, 
though a fool, need not be deceived by it. 

In publishing these messages I am complying with 
the earnest desire of many who have heard them to 
see them in print. May the God who guided David's 
stone to Goliath's brain guide my pebble to its mark. 

S. A. S. 
Mansfield, La. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Modern Theory of the Bible . 21 

II. Genesis in the Light of Modern 

Science 69 

III. The Hebrew Prophets . ... 109 



I 

THE MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 



THE MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

HIGHER Criticism, a term of which we hear 
so much in the current discussions of the 
Bible, is the historical study of the books of 
the Bible as books. "President King," says Dr. 
Mains, himself a "higher critic," "has thus defined 
its scope: 'Positively, higher criticism may be de- 
fined as a careful historical and literary study of a 
book to determine its unity, age, authorship, literary 
form, and reliability. In the determination of these 
problems, account is taken of the historical refer- 
ences contained in the book, of the style of the book, 
of the opinions expressed in it, of the citations made 
in it, and of the testimony (or lack of testimony) to 
this book found in other books of acknowledged au- 
thority, where some reference might be expected. 
The higher criticism of the book is thus, in the main, 
a painstaking study of the book itself to get at the 
facts about it." 

Certainly this "process is perfectly legitimate," 
and will always possess interest and value for Bible 
students. But it is a process which has led to widely 
divergent views, so that we have "destructive higher 
criticism," and "conservative higher criticism," ac- 

21 



22 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

cording as the conclusions impair or promote belief 
in the Bible as a divinely inspired book. In the 
common understanding of the term, higher criticism 
has come to mean the destructive criticism of the 
Bible; and when you speak of the higher critic, the 
non-professional person understands you to mean 
one who holds the radical theory. For my part, I 
see nothing "high" about it; and it has certainly 
given us some very "low" ideas about the Bible. I 
hold to the conservative higher criticism. I believe 
the method of the destructive higher critic is wrong, 
his data largely imaginary, and his conclusions arbi- 
trary and false. The modern theory of the Bible is 
a skyscraper built on sand. 

According to the traditional theory of the Bible, 
in which I believe, and which I maintain in these 
messages, the books of the Bible were written for 
the most part by the men whose names they bear; 
that these men were inspired in a supernatural sense 
to preserve a trustworthy record of the history of 
the Jewish people, and of the events leading up to 
that history from the beginning of the world ; and 
that in that history we have an authentic revelation 
of the one true God and his plan of salvation for 
man. This does not mean that the sacred writers 
were automatons through whom, as through a ma- 
chine like a victrola, God spake to man. Nor does 
it mean that the ipsissima verba, the very words 
themselves were dictated. The Bible is not inerrant 
in the sense that it contains no mistakes in chron- 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 23 

ology and unimportant discrepancies in narrative. 
It is perfectly consistent with the conservative view 
of the Bible, and a sound historical method of study, 
to think that in the transmission of the original doc- 
uments through all the vicissitudes of time, the revo- 
lutions and changes, the upheavals and destructions 
of human progress through the ages, there were in- 
terpolations and additions to the text. No sensible 
person supposes that Moses wrote the account of his 
own death and burial. 

Nor is it inconsistent with this view of the Bible 
to believe that the twenty-seven chapters that form 
the latter part of the Prophecy of Isaiah, were not 
spoken by Isaiah, but by some unknown prophet of 
the Captivity, and were attached to the real Isaiah 
because they are the logical fulfilment of his mes- 
sages, and have such close affinity with his thought. 
But this is a very different thing from saying that 
Moses did not write any, or almost nothing, of the 
books attributed to him; and that there is hardly 
anything in the book of Isaiah that really came from 
him, which is the teaching of the Destructive criti- 
cism. 

Conservative criticism teaches that the inspiration 
of the Bible was "an actuating energy" of the Holy 
Ghost on the mind of the sacred writer that enabled 
him to understand and to declare spiritual truth un- 
discoverable by human reason; which gave him in- 
sight into the moral constitution and spiritual laws 
and meaning of the world, but left him free to speak 



24 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

as a man to his fellow men; and he spoke under all 
the limitations of human nature. The Bible is as 
much a human as it is a divine book; but it is also 
as much a divine book as it is a human book. While 
it is perfectly right to study the Bible using the same 
methods that we use in studying the history of any 
other people, we must never forget that God was 
with the Jewish people as he was not with any other 
people. He chose them and set them apart from all 
other people, that he might train them, and through 
them reveal his truth to the human race. In this 
process of moral education, God manifested himself 
to the Hebrews as he did not to the Egyptians or 
the Chaldeans, the Greeks or the Romans, and they 
became the custodians of a divine revelation, the 
record of which we have in the Bible. 

Some of the destructive higher critics seem un- 
conscious of the logical inconsistencies of their the- 
ory. Take as an example Professor George Adam 
Smith, one of the most distinguished Biblical schol- 
ars of his age. In his book, "Modern Criticism and 
the Preaching of the Old Testament," he "bases 
his proof of a divine revelation in the Old Testa- 
ment/' says Dr. Orr, on the fact that "in a phys- 
ical environment very fertile in polytheism, Israel 
alone was enabled, not merely to rise above this to 
a stage of religion subordinate only to the Chris- 
tianity of Christ, but to exhibit throughout her 
whole history a religious progress which Christ af- 
firmed to be the gradual preparation for himself. 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 25 

To this unique exception in the history of Semitic 
religion it is my firm belief," says Dr. Smith, "that 
only one cause can be assigned, and that is that in 
the religion of Israel, as recorded in the Old Testa- 
ment, there is an authentic revelation of the one true 
God." In these words Dr. Smith definitely admits 
a supernatural element in the history of the Jews, 
which is a fundamental principle of Conservative 
criticism. But the attempt to interpret Old Testa- 
ment history on naturalistic principles, which is the 
fundamental fallacy of Destructive criticism, flatly 
contradicts this fact. Dr. Smith's admission of a 
supernatural element in Hebrew history logically 
annihilates half of his critical conclusions about the 
books of the Old Testament; for these conclusions 
are based on the supposition that the history of the 
Jews is to be interpreted just as the history of any 
other people. 

Furthermore, the Conservative theory teaches that 
the revelation contained in the Old Testament, as 
Dr. Smith admits, was a gradual preparation for 
Christ. It was related from the beginning to what 
St. Paul called a "hidden wisdom," a secret pur- 
pose, which could not be made known until the "ful- 
ness of the time;" it, therefore, had a unity and con- 
sistency with itself that the history of no other na- 
tion possesses, and that constitutes one of the most 
striking evidences of its truth. The Destructive 
critic says that we read modern theological meanings 
into the primitive incidents of Israel's history which 



26 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

they were never intended to convey. But how is it 
that you can read these modern meanings into the 
primitive incidents of Israel's history, and cannot 
read them into the primitive incidents of any other 
ancient people? How is it that the whole history of 
the moral progress of our race through conflict with 
evil is a practical commentary on the promise con- 
tained in Genesis that "the seed" of the woman 
should "bruise" the serpent's head, while it should 
"bruise his heel?" Can you see anything else in 
that brief, yet comprehensive statement, than a won- 
derful forecast of moral struggle issuing finally in 
the triumph of the truth ? Is it not remarkable that 
a tale told to explain to children why snakes crawl 
should be capable of translation into the terms of all 
subsequent history, and proves to be an epitome of 
the record of the race ! 

The modern theory of the Bible empties the Old 
Testament of all that is supernatural and reduces it 
to the level of the tales of Homer and the stories of 
Herodotus. But according to the Conservative 
criticism we do not read into the ancient history of 
the Jews meanings they were not intended to con- 
vey. Jesus told the Jews that Moses wrote of him, 
and that away back of Moses, Abraham understood 
the spiritual meaning of history, and foresaw his 
"day." St. Peter declared the true philosophy of 
history, when he said that "the prophets enquired 
and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace 
that should come ; searching what, or what manner 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 2.7 

of time, the Spirit of Christ which was in them did 
signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings 
of Christ, and the glory that should follow." That 
shows what has always been, and always will be, 
the main current of human history. No one can in- 
terpret the history of the world who does not un- 
derstand that truth. According to that interpreta- 
tion, the whole system of Christian truth is implicit 
in the earliest facts connected with the origin of 
man, and is gradually unfolded in the history of the 
Jews. 

According to the "faith of our fathers," Jesus 
Christ is the subject of the Bible from beginning to 
end. Every patriarch in every niche in God's West- 
minster Abbey; every prophet whose shining face 
looks forth from every chiseled bust; every saint 
whose glowing countenance beams from the gor- 
geous windows ; every poet, mantled in light, whose 
harp vibrates with celestial music, is pointing with 
a star-tipped rod to the transfigured Christ ! Every 
ray of light that trembles through the solemn air, 
and quivers around monumental urn, and streams 
along the crystal aisles, and flames from sacramental 
shrines, and flashes from the sapphire dome of this 
great temple of truth, is focussed upon Christ, the 
Redeemer of the world ! Every anthem extols him 
as King of kings and Lord of lords; and the uni- 
versal chorus, whose trembling thunders of adoring 
worship reverberate among the lofty arches of sacred 
history stretching along the whole course of time, 



28 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

proclaim him Lord of all! The glory of Christ il- 
luminates this mighty minister of God from the 
seraph-guarded gate of the Eden that was lost to 
the pearly portal of the Paradise regained through 
his redeeming love. The Bible was given to reveal 
Christ, in whom is the fulness of the Godhead bod- 
ily ; and this unique purpose binds its different parts 
into a vital unity, and lifts this book out of the 
category of human literature and attests its divinity. 

It is highly important to remember that the truth 
of the Bible does not depend on who wrote it, or 
when or where it was written. The supreme evi- 
dence that it is the word of God is its adaptation to 
the spiritual needs of man. As the eye corresponds 
to the light; as the lung corresponds to the air; as 
the stomach corresponds to the food that nourishes 
the body; so the Bible corresponds to man's moral 
nature and nourishes his soul. In the fine language 
of Coleridge, the Bible "finds" us. It is the key 
that opens the lock of conscience, and that is what 
we want a key for. Whether the key was made in 
Switzerland or in Connecticut, of steel or of brass, 
or was brought to us by an Englishman or an Indian, 
may be of interest; but it is not essential. The 
Bible is the key that unlocks the treasures of the 
knowledge of God; gives us the only rational ex- 
planation of life; and while it finds us, enables us 
to find God and to get right with him. To well in- 
formed people, therefore, who are capable of dis- 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 29 

criminating in such matters, it is unessential whether 
Deuteronomy was written by Moses 1500 years be- 
fore Christ, or by some unknown priest 300 years 
before Christ. But few people are so discriminat- 
ing. Most people identify the message with its his- 
tory, which is perfectly natural, since Christianity is 
a historical religion. To tell the average man, un- 
versed in the subtilties of literary and historical 
criticism, that the great facts, or what he has always 
believed to be the great facts related in Genesis are 
fables invented to satisfy the naive curiosity of chil- 
dren, is to destroy his faith in Genesis as a revela- 
tion of God. One can understand how the great and 
solemn fact of the origin of sin in the world is veiled 
in allegory — if allegory it be — of the "serpent" that 
tempted Eve; but to say that it is a story told by 
some pre-historic parent to explain to his children 
"why snakes crawl" is to empty the narrative of all 
meaning, rob it of all dignity, and destroy its author- 
ity over the conscience. That would be a tragedy in 
the life of any man, even if the theory were un- 
doubtedly true ; for nothing can compare in sadness 
with the loss of religious belief. But the modern 
theory of the late origin and mythological character 
of much of the Old Testament is undoubtedly false. 
As a fair sample of the modern theory of the 
Bible I quote the following from The Old Testa- 
ment in the Life of To-day, a scholarly work by 
Rev. J. A. Rice, D.D., now Professor of Old Tes- 
tament Literature in the Southern Methodist Uni- 



3 o MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

versity, at Dallas, Texas. Speaking of the book of 
Genesis, he says: "There can be no doubt that the 
First Chapter of Genesis undertakes to answer with 
naive simplicity questions primitive peoples had to 
face — how the universe, including man and animals, 
came into existence ; why women are subject to men; 
why they bear children in pain; why snakes crawl; 
how sin came into the world; how people came to 
wear clothes ; why people suffer and die ; why thorns 
and thistles make farming so difficult — indeed, why 
hard work is at all; what was the origin of races and 
languages, etc., etc. The answers given to these, 
and many like questions, in Genesis, conflict directly 
with our modern scientific conceptions. We have 
now abandoned the effort to harmonise the two, for 
to do so is to juggle with plain facts." * 

According to that theory, the book of Genesis is 
a compilation of mythological tales, like the legends 
and fables of the pre-historic ages of Greece and 
Rome. They have no historical value or theological 
meaning. They are folk-lore, the "Br'er Rabbit" 
tales told around the camp-fires of the cave men, ven- 
erable apes, still rubbing the stumps of their caudal 
appendages against the stones. They told these tales 
with naive simplicity to satisfy the curiosity of the 
little intellectual and developing monkeys around 
them. At some late period subsequent to the re- 
turn of the Jews from the captivity in Babylon, these 
tales were collected and promulgated under the fic- 

1 The Old Testament in the Life of To-day, p. 135. 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 31' 

titious authority of a mythical hero named Moses. 
From being the inspired lawgiver and divinely 
guided statesman of our old, but now obsolete Bible, 
a man "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians 
and mighty in words and deeds," according to the 
modern theory of the Bible Moses shrinks into a 
fabulous character, a sort of Hebrew Hercules ; and 
the wonders he is said to have wrought to compel 
Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go out of Egypt, 
were not miracles, but tricks of magic, sleight-of- 
hand performances, feats of thaumaturgic skill, 
similar to the marvels artful jugglers perform to- 
day. Moses simply beat the magicians in the game, 
and Dr. Rice says he was a "master magician, able 
to command with his magic wand the forces of na- 
ture like some mystic giant in fairy land." * On this 
theory all the wonders of Israel's ancient history 
are on a par with the legend of the Argonauts. 

There is nothing new in this theory. It is an 
American edition of German Rationalism. There is 
a striking parallel between the conclusions of the 
Higher Criticism of the Iliad and the Bible. Hom- 
er's Iliad was for a long time the Bible of the 
Greeks, not in the sense in which the Holy Scrip- 
tures are our Bible, i.e., a book containing a reve- 
lation of the true God ; but as a record of the heroic 
deeds of their ancestors, the story of their gods and 
goddesses, and the fount of inspiration to the Hel- 
lenic race. Even after the rise of philosophy and 

1 The Old Testament in the Life of To-day, p. 139. 



3 2 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

history, when the great thinkers of Greece had cast 
ridicule on the teachings of the Iliad, it remained 
the most venerable literary monument of their an- 
tiquity and commanded the universal admiration of 
the world. For centuries the Iliad and the Odyssey 
were regarded as substantially the work of a great 
genius named Homer, modified, perhaps, in some 
unimportant respects by the interpolations and addi- 
tions natural in the transmission of written docu- 
ments through long ages ; but in the main the work 
of Homer. 

But the destructive higher criticism threw the 
Iliad into a deep eclipse for a time. In 1795 a Ger- 
man scholar, named Wolf, brought out a new ver- 
sion of the Iliad. He prefaced his book with an in- 
troduction in which he discussed the origin and his- 
tory of the famous poem, and startled the literary 
world with his destructive conclusions. According 
to Wolf, the Iliad was not the work of one man, but 
of a multitude of poets, and its composition stretched 
over centuries of time. If such a man as Homer 
ever existed, which was doubtful, he was only one 
of many who contributed to the great national epic 
of the Greeks. These separate poems were collected 
and put into shape as one book by Pisistratus, the 
ruler of Athens, in the fifth century before Christ. 
Wolf based these conclusions chiefly on two alleged 
facts, the absence of the art of writing among the 
Greeks in Homer's time, and internal differences 
of style. According to Wolf, the Greeks of Horn- 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 33 

er's age were without writing, and it would be im- 
possible to compose such a long poem without re- 
ducing it to writing ; and he claimed that there were 
differences in style, contradictions, anachronisms, 
and numerous literary variations in the poem that 
destroyed the theory of its unity. Such a radical 
attack on one of the most venerated literary docu- 
ments of mankind naturally produced a profound 
sensation in the intellectual world. But it com- 
pletely failed, and old Homer shines to-day with 
all of his original brightness. Dr. Smith, in his 
history of Greece, which reflects the larger work 
of Grote, says that the best scholarship has re- 
jected the theory of Wolf and restored the Iliad to 
its former place. 

"We can only state," says Dr. Smith, "that the 
best modern scholars, with very few exceptions, 
have come to a conclusion directly contrary to 
Wolf's daring theory. Some of the ablest critics 
in modern times have directed their attention to the 
subject, and while they have not denied the existence 
of interpolations, more or less extensive, in both 
poems, (the Iliad and the Odyssey) the general re- 
sult has been to establish their poetical unity, and 
to vindicate their claim to be the greatest models of 
the epic art." 1 These words are as true of the Bible 
as they are of the Iliad. 

By precisely analogous reasoning, the destructive 
higher criticism has torn the Bible to pieces, made 

1 Smith's History of Greece, p. 46. 



34 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

Moses a myth, Genesis mythology and Isaiah a 
patch-work of traditions. It is as false in appli- 
cation to the Bible as it was to the Iliad ; but to the 
extent that it is accepted, its consequences to Chris- 
tian faith will be disastrous. It makes "the faith 
of our fathers ;" the faith founded by Jesus and 
baptised with Pentecostal flame; the faith that re- 
sisted the fires of persecution and defied imperial 
Rome to quench it; the faith that created Christen- 
dom, built the great cathedrals, wrote the In Me- 
moriam, cleared the paths of progress and climbed 
the heights of hope; the faith that has for ages held 
"the promise and the potency" of a redeemed hu- 
manity on earth, but the baseless fabric of a dream I 
One has only to think it through to its logical end 
to land in an abyss of nothingness. The denial of 
the supernatural is implicit in the whole modern 
theory of the Bible. It is an attempt to explain re- 
vealed religion on naturalistic principles. 

By a process of intellectual atavism, the destruo 
tive higher critics have reverted to the Deism of a 
hundred years ago. As a movement of thought, 
Deism began with an attempt to get rid of the "ir- 
rational" element in revealed religion, and ended 
by getting rid of revealed religion ! It was only one 
of the waves of infidelity that have dashed against 
the impregnable rock of the inspired Bible, and re- 
coiled into the deep. The destructive higher criti- 
cism of the Old Testament will go the same way. 

One of the most scholarly works on the Bible is 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 13.5 

the Popular and Critical Biblical Encyclopedia. 
This great work was edited by the eminent prelate, 
the Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows, D.D., LLD., assisted 
by more than a hundred of the foremost scholars of 
this country. Speaking of this modern theory of the 
Bible, page 470, it says : "It has gained notoriety 
chiefly from the startling and extravagant nature of 
its results, and the confidence with which it has been 
put forward; the confidence being in inverse pro- 
portion to the solidity of the foundations upon which 
these statements rest. . . . When we ask for the 
evidence upon which the unanimous belief of cen- 
turies is reversed, and the authenticity and trust- 
worthiness of the Old Testament Scriptures are alike 
denied, we find that it consists almost entirely of a 
philological analysis made by European and Amer- 
ican scholars. Passages are torn from their context 
and assigned to authors who are supposed to have 
lived centuries after the events which they record 
took place, if indeed they ever took place at all. 
And this is done on the strength of a few words, or 
idioms, which the philologist assumes to indicate a 
particular authority or a particular date. The con- 
clusions which are thus obtained are often supported 
only by microscopic contradictions detected in the 
text, many of which are due to the arbitrary inter- 
pretation of the critic, or by his dogmatic asser- 
tion that the statements contained in it are in- 
credible." 
When you consider the list of scholars who un- 



36 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

derwrite that statement, you will think twice before 
you send your mother's Bible to a museum of lit- 
erary relics of antiquity. It is characteristic of the 
destructive higher critical school that they assume 
that they have modern learning on their side, and 
they smile with a sort of haughty superiority and 
intellectual contempt on all who do not accept their 
speculations as either ignorant, or imprisoned in a 
dungeon of prejudice. Read that list of scholars 
and you can return the smile and puncture the con- 
ceit. You are in splendid intellectual company when 
you believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and 
that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, was a prophet in 
Israel ! 

i 

I repudiate the higher critical theory which teaches 
that Genesis is mythology and the prophets, "from 
Moses to Samuel little more than dervishes," for 
the following reasons: 

First: The evidence on which this theory rests is 
vague, uncertain, arbitrary, and for the most part 
pure conjecture. 

It is based mainly on two assumptions : first, the 
late origin of writing, and second, that internal dif- 
ferences of style indicate different authors. Let us 
examine these main pillars of the system, and we 
will find them made of paste-board painted to look 
like marble! First, the assumption of the late ori- 
gin of writing is amply refuted by archeology. The 
higher critics have been routed at every point on this 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 37 

field. They denied that there was any written his- 
tory in Greece before the time of Solon, and de- 
clared that the tale of Troy was fiction; "but these 
men have been forced from the field by the excava- 
tions of Dr. Schliemann and others, who have veri- 
fied Greek tradition by clothing the Achaean princes 
and the kings of Mycenae with flesh and blood. The 
remains of Troy have been found, although it had 
long been declared to have existed only in cloud- 
land." We now know that when Moses wrote Gen- 
esis, writing had been in use, perhaps, for a thou- 
sand years. For a long time the higher critics 
stoutly denied the existence of such a person as 
Chedalaomer, and declared that the whole story of 
Abraham's bold adventure and triumph, as related 
in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, was fiction; 
but the whole narrative has been fully vindicated 
by Assyrian tablets in the British Museum and in 
the Museum of Constantinople, and the "etymolog- 
ical fictions" of the higher critics turn out to have 
been historic realities! The Popular and Critical 
Biblical Encyclopedia referred to above, says "Ar- 
cheology has confirmed our confidence in the his- 
torical accuracy of the Old Testament in a two-fold 
manner: first, by showing the high literary culture 
of the age to which the books belong ; and second, by 
recent and reliable archeological discoveries which 
have shown that the doubts which had been cast 
upon the antiquity and credibility of the Old Testa- 
ment narratives are wholly unwarranted." All the 



38 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

facts of archeology are against the modern theory 
of the Bible. Every stroke of the archeologist's pick 
in the ancient ruins of the east smashes the theory 
like an egg-shell ! 

The second assumption, that internal differences 
of style indicate different authors, is arbitrary, un- 
warranted by facts, and contradicts ordinary com- 
mon sense by its fantastic speculation. Many of the 
alleged differences of style are discoverable only by 
a philological microscope, and when discovered do 
not prove the critic's point. He follows a wrong 
method and the basis of his reasoning is false. His 
whole argument about "J" and "E," and "JE" 
and "JED," is arbitrary and fanciful. It has no 
foundation in a correct philology and was invented 
to support a purely fictitious theory. Its main 
strength is the audacity of its assertion. It is a pure 
invention, a technique of criticism as thin as a 
spider's web. The wonder is that any man would 
be deceived by it. Its general application would play 
havoc with the literature of the world. We have 
seen what it did for Homer's Iliad until a sounder 
scholarship rescued the "Grand Old Bard" from the 
clutches of literary Bolshevism ! God pity the man 
who will give his Bible up for such pretended rea- 
sons. He is like a "wave of the sea, driven with the 
wind and tossed." 

By the same critical process you can dissect Ten- 
nyson's poems, and prove that one man wrote 
"Maud," another "The Northern Farmer," another 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 39 

"In Memoriam," and still another the drama of 
"Queen Mary." The dialectical differences, the 
"atmosphere," the forms and idioms, and the whole 
structure of thought, are just as marked. Yet we 
know that Tennyson wrote them all. A thousand 
years from now he may become a "myth" to the 
higher critics of that time, and if they are like the 
higher critics of to-day, they will affirm that these 
differences of style in the poetry prove a variety of 
authors, who, being unknown, the poems will all be 
grouped under the name of Tennyson! They will 
be as near right as the higher critics are to-day about 
Genesis. 

It is no proof that different authors wrote Gene- 
sis, and other books of the Bible, because in some 
places God is called "Elohim," and in others "Jeho- 
vah." These profound names signify different as- 
pects of the Supreme Being, and different relations 
which God sustains to man; and the same writer 
might use them, and we believe did use them, in 
writing the first five books of the Bible. Moses was 
a very learned man, and doubtless made use of many 
sources of religious knowledge ancient even in his 
day ; but he wrote under the inspiration of the Holy 
Spirit, and gave us a broad and reliable sketch of 
the historic background of redemption, which was 
his fundamental purpose. No intelligent person 
denies that these differences of style exist, or that 
Moses used older documents and traditions, or that 
his own writings have undergone subsequent revi- 



40 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

sion; but we assert that these facts do not justify 
the conclusion of the higher criticism that Genesis 
is mythology, and the Pentateuch a literary crazy 
quilt put together by unknown writers of a late 
period. We cannot afford to "scrap" the Bible, 
like an obsolete battleship, on the strength of such 
literary guessing. I repeat, that the evidence on 
which this modern theory of the Bible rests is vague, 
uncertain, arbitrary, and for the most part pure 
conjecture. 

Second : The modern theory of the Bible contra- 
dicts the ancient and uniform tradition of the Jews 
as to the origin of their sacred books. 

According to the higher criticism the Old Testa- 
ment was put into practically its present form in 444 
B. C, about the time that Pisistratus and Solon were 
editing into order the poems of Homer. That is 
to say, more than 2300 years ago the learned schol- 
ars of that time attributed the books of the Old Tes- 
tament to the authors whose names they bear. But 
certain learned men of to-day have discovered that 
those old scholars were mistaken. These modern 
scholars have found out by literary inspection that 
Moses did not write the books ascribed to him, and 
that Genesis is a collection of mythological tales, 
told to explain why snakes crawl, and so on. Now 
which were more likely to know who wrote these 
books, the scholarly man who lived 2300 years 
nearer the time when they were written, or the men 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 41 

who lived 2300 years farther away from that time? 
Is it wise, is it reasonable, to set aside a tradition 
so ancient and so uniform, and so consistent with 
the historical record of Israel and the special mis- 
sion of the Jewish race, for the flimsy speculations 
of this modern theory ? For my part I believe those 
ancient scholars knew more about it than these wise 
men of Chicago. At any rate, I shall not exchange 
the luminous and vital tradition for the vague and 
fantastic theory of the destructive higher criticism 
until it can produce better evidence of its truth 
than it has presented yet. I have profound respect 
for real Biblical scholarship, and have derived vast 
advantage from the historical study of the Bible in 
the light of modern discoveries ; but a tradition hal- 
lowed by centuries of undisputed belief, and that 
has in itself all the "potency and promise" of a con- 
structive faith in God, and in the Bible as an authen- 
tic revelation of his truth, cannot be set aside by a 
theory which is at best only a guess. I do not mean 
that a thing is true simply because it is old, for 
there are some hoary errors in the records of the 
world ; but I do mean that age creates a reasonable 
presumption that a thing which is supported by 
abundant collateral proof is worthy of confidence. 
And the conservative theory of the Bible has com- 
manded the belief and shaped the destiny of the 
race from a remote antiquity. The modern theory 
is an upstart of yesterday compared with it, and 
like all upstarts, it is self-conceited and insolent. 



42 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

With patriotic pride a man boasted to a Jew that 
his forefathers came over the flood in the May- 
flower. The son of Abraham quietly replied that 
his forefathers came over the flood in the ark! 

Third: The modern theory of the unhistoricol 
character of the Old Testament contradicts the tes- 
timony of the New Testament. 

The Sadducees, who were the sceptics in the time 
of Christ; the Pharisees, who were the orthodox; 
Jesus himself, and all his disciples, all quoted from 
the Old Testament as historical according to the 
tradition. Of course, this counts for nothing with 
the higher critics, for the New Testament is as un- 
historical for them as the Old Testament. They 
leave not Moses real nor Christ divine. They ad- 
mit that the Jews in the time of Christ believed 
that Moses wrote the Pentateuch ; but they say they 
were not competent authorities in the field of literary 
criticism ! How did they find that out ? Where is 
their authority for that? It is an assertion without 
proof, and all the facts point the other way. The 
Jews were very careful about their sacred writings. 
The doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures grew out of their scrupulous regard for the 
very words of holy writ. They would not let a let- 
ter, or a dot, be altered. And there were learned 
men in that day. Paul reminds us that "these things 
were not done in a corner." Christ numbered schol- 
arly men among his disciples. Stephen was a man 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 43 

of learning. He met the gifted young Saul, who 
was brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, and in his 
discussion with him in the Synagogue, refuted his 
arguments, cracked the foundations of his heredi- 
tary faith, unsettled his life, and lodged in his con- 
science the convictions that were goads against 
which he kicked in vain till Jesus met him on the 
road to Damascus! Apollos was a learned man, 
came from Alexandria, a city famed throughout the 
world for its scholars. Luke was a man of large 
intelligence and has left us in the Acts of the 
Apostles a masterpiece of historic writing. He tells 
us that he took special pains to investigate and verify 
the sources of his statements. Both Matthew and 
Luke give us genealogical tables based on the his- 
torical veracity of the Old Testament; and Luke 
runs his genealogical table right straight through 
Genesis back to Adam. There is nothing more au- 
dacious, or contradictory of common sense, in the 
higher criticism than its assumption that the writers 
of the New Testament were incompetent judges of 
the integrity and trustworthiness of their sacred 
books. You will be safe if you take the Bible as 
Jesus did, and Jesus taught that Moses wrote the 
books ascribed to him in the Old Testament 

Fourth: The theory of the mythological character 
of Genesis excludes the idea of inspiration. 

The only interest that can attach to it on that 
theory is for the student of archeological lore. It 



44 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

is merely the literary driftwood of a distant past, 
and has no message for the common man, no revela- 
tion for the hungry heart. Now it is evident that 
our Lord, and all the writers of the New Testa- 
ment, regarded the books of the Old Testament, 
not only as valid history, but as written by men who 
were inspired by the Holy Spirit. Peter expressed 
their belief when he said that "holy men of God 
spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." It 
is simply impossible to harmonise that fact with the 
conception of Genesis as a collection of tales told to 
explain "why snakes crawl" and "how people came 
to wear clothes!" That theory of the origin of the 
Old Testament is Rationalism pure and simple ; and 
yet that is what is now being taught in our univer- 
sities! It is dangerous error, and it contradicts 
Jesus and all his disciples ; for they taught that the 
Old Testament was written by the inspiration of 
the Holy Ghost to teach man, not why snakes crawl 
and people wear clothes, but the way of salvation! 
Referring to this "primitive view of nature and his- 
tory," which an eminent higher critic says "Chris- 
tianity must incorporate on pain of extinction," Dr. 
Orr very truly says : "It might be truer to say that 
the Christianity which incorporates this 'modern 
view' is not threatened with extinction, but is al- 
ready extinguished." 

Fifth: The theory of the mythological and un- 
historical character of much of the Old Testament 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 45 

raises a reasonable suspicion of the credibility of 
any of it. 

According to the conservative theory the Bible, 
both the Old and New Testaments, is a divinely in- 
spired book, and contains a system of truth which 
is perfectly consistent with itself. It is like an arch 
in which every part supports the whole, and no part 
can be removed without weakening the whole. And 
the books of the Bible are like blocks of solid marble 
built into a structure of enduring strength. Like 
that kind of stone which when exposed to the 
weather grows harder, exposure to the influences of 
time only renders these massive stones in God's 
temple of truth firmer and more enduring. But ac- 
cording to the modern theory of the Bible it is an 
arch constructed of imperfect material, here and 
there a bit of granite, but for the most part a loose 
conglomerate which disintegrates under the influence 
of time. The shrewd old Jews of Ezra's day gave 
it a veneer that made it look like solid stone, and 
they deceived the world for ages ; but modern schol- 
arship has detected the fraud and exposed the for- 
gery! What confidence can be placed in a volume 
with an origin and history like that? What claim 
can such a book have to speak to the human con- 
science with authority? If Genesis is mythology 
and Deuteronomy a forgery, what assurance have 
we that the gospel of Matthew is not fiction and 
the Epistle to the Romans the rhapsody of some old 
anchorite ! No ! The Bible is a chain of gold, each 



46 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

book is a link forged by the Holy Spirit. The first 
link fastened to the throne of God, "it dropped in 
order, symmetry, and light down through chaos and 
darkness, with the eye of God flashing down its en- 
tire length, kindling every link into beauty and 
glory I" * It is no stronger than its weakest link, 
but its weakest link is as strong as the truth of God. 
By that chain the lost world is anchored to the Rock 
of Ages. Satan, in the armour of the higher criti- 
cism, seeks to break that chain; but "the word of 
the Lord endureth forever." 

All systems of knowledge are based on meta- 
physics, and the underlying thought foundations of 
the destructive higher criticism is a conception of 
God that resolves him into an interrogation point. 
The modern theory of the Bible is a part of a wider 
system of negation that doubts, if it does not deny, 
the reality of all religion. Its true motto is Pilate's 
question to Jesus, "What is truth?" According to 
this theory all things are in a state of instability 
and flux, and always will be. Nothing is ever fin- 
ished. There are no fundamentals. The universe 
itself is but a passing phenomenon, a vanishing 
stage of being in an ever on-going stream of evolu- 
tion, an everlasting "becoming." One of the found- 
ers and ablest expounders of this system, says: 
"The conception of the Cosmos, instead of a per- 
sonal God, as the finality to which we are led by 

1 Munsey, Lectures, p. 423. 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 47 

perception and thought, or the ultimate fact beyond 
which we cannot proceed, assumes the more defi- 
nite shape of matter infinitely agitated, which, by 
differentiation and integration, develops itself to 
ever higher forms and functions, and describes an 
everlasting circle by evolution, dissolution, and then 
fresh evolution. ... If this be considered pure, 
unmitigated materialism, I will not dispute it." x 

Christianity, according to this theory, is only one 
of our "little systems" that "have their day and cease 
to be." They are not even "broken lights" of God; 
for God himself is a subjective conception, projected 
from our inner self and changing like all else. A 
misty "Elohim" served for the apes who were be- 
ginning to walk on two feet when company came. 
After the evolution of ages, the antiquated Elohim 
gave place to "Yahweh," and Yahweh in turn to 
the conception of Jesus of God as our "Father." 
Now we have out-grown that, and one of the God 
makers of this scheme of thought has given us a 
new deity in God, the Invisible King, by H. G. Wells. 
He is as ugly, as grotesque, and as absurd to com- 
mon sense, as the big statue of Buddha; but it is the 
best he can do, and is a fair sample of the modern 
deity-maker's art. For my part, I would rather have 
a silver image of Diana; for I could invest the beau- 
tiful idol with imaginary attributes, and enjoy the 
delusion. But Mr. Wells' Invisible King is as 
repulsive to my esthetic sensibilities as to my eth- 

1 Strauss, Old Faith and New, vol. 2, p. 35. 



48 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

ical convictions. There is no more pathetic char- 
acter in the world to-day than H. G. Wells. His 
books are read by millions. He is evidently in des- 
perate earnest to find the truth. He catches bright 
glimpses of it now and then, as when he says that 
Christianity is the only hope of the race; but his 
mind is unbalanced, lacks logical training, has more 
sail of fancy than ballast of reason. He is like a 
mariner at sea without chart or compass, anxious 
to steer the ship to the harbour, but all his bearings 
unknown, and drifting with the wind and tide! He 
reminds one of Laocoon, struggling with the ser- 
pents on the seashore. He is a fair sample of the 
intellectual out-put of the higher criticism : — I mean 
of that system of thought which, in the name of 
progress, rejects the venerable "faith once delivered 
to the saints," and reverting to the uncertain prem- 
ises of heathen philosophy, attempts to solve "The 
Riddle of the Universe" by the light of human rea- 
son alone. Mr. Wells is utterly incompetent to 
write "History." He does not understand the al- 
phabet of its spiritual interpretation — does not know 
where we are or where we are going : the origin and 
destiny of the race are alike an unsolved riddle to 
him. And no wonder, for the Bible to him is no 
more than the history of Greece or Rome; Genesis 
a collection of tales told to explain "why snakes 
crawl," and weeds grow ! 

Now over against this rickety structure of the 
destructive higher criticism, with its denial of the 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 49 

historic truth of the Bible, its barren negations, its 
illogical speculations, its audacious dogmatism, and 
its poisonous gases of scepticism escaping from 
every chamber, stands "The Impregnable Rock of 
Holy Scripture;" the age-hallowed and profound 
conception of the Bible as the inspired literature of 
a chosen people, in which we have an authentic reve- 
lation of the living and true God, his purpose in 
creation, and his plan for the human race on this 
planet. According to the Bible, Jesus Christ is a 
finality. He is the "Alpha and Omega," the be- 
ginning and the ending, which is, and which was, 
and which is to come." In him dwelt "all the ful- 
ness of the Godhead bodily," and we "are complete 
in him, which is the head of all principality and 
power." You can never get a Christ like that from 
the modern theory of the Bible ! 

At one point the modern philosophy of "Prag- 
matism" coincides with the teaching of Jesus: "By 
their fruits ye shall know them." We have a right, 
therefore, both by the authority of our Lord and 
the canon of their own philosophy, to ask what kind 
of fruit we may expect from this modern view of 
the Bible. And here we are confronted by a colos- 
sal demonstration of it in modern Germany. This 
modern view of the Bible was born in Germany and 
has borne its appropriate fruit there. What that 
fruit is all intelligent people know. It destroyed 
faith in the Bible, and made a nation of infidels. 



50 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

It destroyed the national conscience, and created a 
ruthless national spirit. It substituted the Darwin- 
ian principle of brute force for the Christian prin- 
ciple of love, and reverted to the law of the jungle. 
To use Gladstone's fine expression, Germany be- 
came "the negation of God created into a system of 
government," Her "kultur" became a creed of 
blood, and all the forces of civilisation were subsi- 
dised as agencies of destruction. 

In classic legends we read of a huge serpent that 
made his den in a cave. Issuing forth from the 
cave, the monster terrified the surrounding country. 
Cadmus slew the serpent, and as he stood looking at 
his huge body, he heard a voice bidding him bury the 
serpent's teeth in the ground. He obeyed the com- 
mand. Soon the sod began to tremble, then points 
of spears appeared as thick as grass blades. Then 
the helmets and heads of soldiers arose, and soon 
there was an army of fierce warriors around him 
in dread array! Germany sowed the Dragon's 
teeth of Rationalism that destroyed faith in the 
Bible as a supernatural revelation, and they sprang 
up in savage armies that shook the civilisation of the 
world. To the extent which this theory gains foot- 
hold here in America, it will produce the same re- 
sult. Yet the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 
authorises it to be taught in her universities ! 

One of the most conspicuous fruits of the mod- 
ern theory of the Bible, growing on its lowest limb 
and on its topmost bough, is incertitude of belief. 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 51 

Where it does not destroy faith, it unsettles it, ren- 
ders it feeble and hesitating, and fosters the doubt 
that results in spiritual paralysis. The changed at- 
titude of the present age to religious truth is chiefly 
due to this theory of the Bible. In his Varieties of 
Religious Experience, p. 91, William James says: 
"We have now whole congregations whose preach- 
ers, far from magnifying our consciousness of sin, 
seem rather devoted to making little of it. They 
ignore, or deny, eternal punishment, and insist on 
the dignity rather than the depravity of man. They 
look at the continual preoccupation of the old-fash- 
ioned Christian with the salvation of his soul as 
something sickly and reprehensible rather than ad- 
mirable; and a sanguine and 'muscular' attitude, 
which to our fore-fathers would have seemed purely 
heathen, has become in their eyes an ideal element of 
Christian character. . . . But in that 'theory of 
evolution' which, gathering momentum for a cen- 
tury, has within the past twenty-five years swept so 
rapidly over Europe and America, we see the ground 
laid for a new sort of religion of nature, which has 
entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of 
a large part of our generation." 

William James calls this "advance of liberalism" 
a healthy sign. That is, a movement "which has 
entirely displaced Christianity from the thought of 
a large part of our generation" is a healthy sign! 
That may suit the latitude of Boston, but it ought 
to be rank heresy in all evangelical circles. But 



52 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

James states a solemn truth. It is evident in the 
intellectual attitude of scholarly men to-day to- 
ward the fundamental doctrines of the Christian re- 
ligion. I venture to affirm that there is not a promi- 
nent man to-day, who holds the modern view of 
the Bible, who believes positively and definitely in 
the personality of God, the reality of sin, the neces- 
sity of atonement, the divinity of Jesus, the certainty 
of future punishment, and the immortality of the 
soul. All of these great truths are unmistakably 
taught in the Bible, but "the advance of liberalism" 
has unsettled belief in them. Dr. Van Dyke says: 
"The influence of the great mass of popular litera- 
ture in which religion is practically ignored, tends 
to foster the impression that it is a subject in regard 
to which certainty is neither necessary nor attain- 
able. The existence of God, the reality of the soul, 
the prospect of immortality, — these appear like in- 
soluble problems to many of the children of this age. 
They are troubled and depressed and impoverished 
by the want of faith, but they accept indecision as 
the only rational attitude, and try to do the best 
they can without believing in 'the truths that never 
can be proved/ " This is the logical result of the 
modern theory of the Bible. 

Another fruit of this loss of faith in the Bible 
as the authoritative word of God is the prevalence 
of lawlessness. The fear of God, and not the fear 
of the law, is the real foundation of society. Though 
the Roman statesmen had no faith in the Gods they 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 53 

worshipped, yet, with profound wisdom, they real- 
ised that religion was the only force that can con- 
trol the wayward passions of men, and they pro- 
moted it as a police measure. Even Voltaire real- 
ised that if there were no God it would be necessary 
to create one. The modern view of the Bible has 
to a large extent destroyed its authority over the 
conscience of men, and society is reaping its legiti- 
mate fruit in contempt of law. It is said that 65,000 
girls are kidnapped every year in the United States, 
and that 36,000 are annually bought and sold in 
New York city for infamous purposes. Divorce 
has become a national menace and marriage the 
jest of the vaudeville stage and the society journal. 
Murder, robbery, and dishonesty of all kinds, make 
our daily papers almost police gazettes. Millions 
admire a pugilistic prize fight that gives the lie to 
all of our boasted idealism, and exalts brute force 
as the popular ideal. Meantime, the family altar 
has fallen down, and the sermon become a tame 
essay on ethics, and experimental religion an eccen- 
tricity, and the holy Sabbath a day of frivolity and 
dissipated pleasure. 

In his book, The Science of Power, which should 
be read by all intelligent people, Mr. Benjamin Kidd 
attributes the terrific conflict with Germany to an 
"atavistic reversion" to the pagan ideal of civilisa- 
tion, and traces it to Darwin's book, The Origin of 
'Species. The doctrine of Evolution as set forth in 
Darwin's book gave a scientific basis for Prussian 



54 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

militarism. Adopted and popularised in Germany 
by Haeckel, Nietzsche, Treitsche, and the "Intellec- 
tuals," it became the soul of German "Kultur," and 
was incorporated in the organic military law by the 
General Staff in their official instructions, entitled 
Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege. This doctrine of evo- 
lution that inspired the "Kultur" of Germany also 
produced this modern theory of the Bible. Dr. 
Lyman Abbott said: "Evolution has revolutionised 
our conception of the origin of sin, of the nature of 
the Bible, and of the authority of the Church." He 
was right in attributing this modern theory of the 
Bible to the doctrine of evolution. 

Now the Darwinian theory of evolution, which 
wrought such immeasurable havoc in the world, is no 
longer a scientific doctrine. Like an obsolete battle- 
ship, it has gone the way of many another scientific 
hypothesis. One eminent scientist of to-day says 
that "the whole enormous intellectual labour of Dar- 
win amounted to nothing." That is too sweeping 
an assertion. Darwin made permanent contribu- 
tions to human knowledge, and cannot be held re- 
sponsible for the vast abuse of his theory; but his 
honest effort to interpret nature is now known to 
have been a mistake, and as it goes down, all the 
theories based upon it go down with it; and this 
modern theory of the Bible is one of them. 

An able writer in the Memphis Commercial-Ap- 
peal, a paper which has nobly defended the conser- 
vative view of the Bible, recently said editorially: 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 55 

"Darwin's speculations concerning the origin of 
man, so augustly sponsored in both the educational 
and religious realms, have played havoc with the 
doctrinal integrity of organised Christianity. The 
astonishing sight is beheld of religious leaders adopt- 
ing his hypothesis with a child-like faith which they 
in turn refuse to the supernatural phases of the 
Sacred Record. From a contemporary we learn 
that no French or English scientist of eminence be- 
lieves in Darwin's theory. We capitally doubt the 
correctness of this assertion. But an official of the 
British Museum is quoted as saying: Tn all this 
great museum there is not a particle of evidence of 
the transmutation of species. Nine-tenths of the 
talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded 
on observation and wholly unsupported by facts.' 

"A report of the Smithsonian Institution affirms: 
'Evolution was expunged from the pages of science 
so completely that it seems it were forever buried 
beyond the hope of resurrection.' Both the London 
and the Washington institutions are under the direc- 
tion of scientists, and some weight must, therefore, 
be attached to utterances from such sources. But it 
has not been many months since a leading southern 
churchman is reported to have defiantly told a pub- 
lic assembly that 'one is a fool who does not believe 
in evolution.' And it is a significant fact that this 
gentleman is under no slightest delusion concerning 
the imperial sweep of his own intellectual powers. 
Godlike, he would doubtless call them." If the 



56 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

"gentleman' ' whose dogmatic assertion elicited the 
sarcasm of the editor had in mind the evolution of 
Darwin, he deserved the rebuke ; for Darwinian evo- 
lution is an exploded theory. 

These are some of the fruits borne by this mod- 
ern theory of the Bible. They are limited to a more 
or less academic circle as yet, but this theory is grad- 
ually insinuating its errors into all our sources of 
religious culture. It is high time to call a halt. We 
cannot ignore this view of the Bible. We must face 
it and fight it from the field. When Lowell said, 
"Time makes ancient truth uncouth," he meant the 
garb of truth. Truth, like God, is unchangeable. 
This modern theory of the Bible is not truth, it is 
error; yet it is entrenched in our universities — 
taught at Yale and Chicago, and Dallas. That dis- 
tinguished German was not wrong who said that 
if they had postponed the war ten years they would 
have had America sufficiently educated to have put 
her on the Teutonic side of the struggle ! That was 
the object of their educational propaganda, and it 
has not been given up. German "Kultur" has an 
ally in every professor who teaches this view of the 
Bible in an American college. Yet Bishops endorse 
it ; lecturers promulgate it on summer assembly plat- 
forms; and preachers spout it from the pulpit. It 
smacks of learning, and harmonises with the super- 
cilious and flippant disdain of the past which is a 
marked characteristic of this age. 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 57 

What attitude shall we' take to this modern theory 
of the Bible? First, we must take the attitude of 
unwavering fidelity to the ancient faith. We must 
not be afraid to stand alone in its defence. We 
may sometimes feel like we are where Elijah thought 
he was when a certain woman sent him a message. 
But we must not make his mistake and run away. 
At the battle of Spottsylvania a handful of brave 
boys saved the day, and turned defeat into victory 
for Lee by sticking to their gun. The whole line 
wavered before the repeated onset of the dauntless 
men in blue ; but they kept ramming in their charges 
and pulling the lanyard until the enemy gave way. 
For a few moments one lad held the line! With 
his head down, and his eyes shut, he pulled the cord, 
and that shot broke the morale of the foe, and they 
recoiled in defeat. God can put armies to flight if 
he can find one man on whom he can depend. We 
recite the creed to-day because one man stood im- 
movably firm for the orthodox faith against the 
world. A greater peril threatens the church now 
than when Athanasius was the solitary champion of 
her truth; for it is not an interpretation of doctrine 
that is at stake now, but the veracity of the docu- 
ments on which her faith is founded. It is a "shak- 
ing" time, and many things are going to pieces ; but 
we have received "a kingdom that cannot be moved !" 
The faith of our fathers is not dead and will not 
die. In spite of infidel universities it is living still 
in millions of happy hearts. It may be submerged 



58 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

for a time by the waves of an arrogant scientific 
spirit that challenges all faith; but it will emerge, 
like the rock the tide overflows, only polished and 
made brighter by the billows that beat against it! 
God will do again as he has done before, and take 
out of some of these very universities a man like 
Moses, or Paul, or Huss, or Luther, or Wesley, who 
will contradict it and build again the faith which 
it destroys. So our first duty is to stand immovably 
firm for the old faith. 

Second, we must hold a hospitable receptive atti- 
tude toward even the destructive higher criticism 
that will gladly accept all that it can teach us. This 
is the scriptural attitude we should sustain towards 
all systems of knowledge. Paul said he was 
"debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians, 
both to the wise and to the unwise." He was in- 
flexibly loyal to his convictions, but this willing- 
ness to receive new truth gave an intellectual dig- 
nity to all his thought and made him a real leader 
'among men. He was one of the most liberal, and 
at the same time, one of the most positive of men. 
John rushed out of the bathhouse when he heard 
that Cerinthus, the heretic, had come in; but Cerin- 
thus was not merely an unbeliever, he was a scoffer. 
And then John was not always right in his radical 
opposition to error. Jesus had to rebuke his intol- 
erant spirit. Many of these higher critics are de- 
vout spiritual men. We dishonour ourselves and do 
them grave injustice if we accuse them of want of 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 59 

fidelity to God because they hold erroneous views. 
Jonathan Edwards, who was called "The metaphy- 
sician of New England/' was a most godly man, 
and was instrumental in a widespread revival of 
religion; yet any one who reads Bledsoe's Theod- 
icy knows that Edward's whole system of thought 
was a stupendous mass of error. Of course, there is 
a vast difference between error that exalts God and 
error that degrades him; between the error that 
exaggerates the inspiration of the Bible and the 
error that denies it. But we want no spirit of 
"Germanism" in our conflict with error. We must 
speak the truth in love. 

I defy any one, though he may have the brains 
of an Edwards and the intellectual ingenuity of the 
traditional Philadelphia lawyer, to harmonise the 
views of such men as Lyman Abbott, Harry Emer- 
son Fosdick, Roger W. Babson, and I might name 
many more, with the teachings of St. Paul. If they 
are right in their views of Christianity, Paul was 
wrong; and if Paul was wrong, then away goes 
the "faith of our fathers" ! The greatest foe to 
vital Christianity to-day is the so-called "liberalism" 
of modern thought. Bishop Warren A. Candler, 
who, both by voice and pen, has valiantly defended 
the faith, recently had a strong article in the church 
papers, under the title Will Just Any Religion Do? 
After quoting Dr. Fosdick's "liberal" sentiments 
about Christianity being a growing religion, Bishop 
Candler says : "If these pompous words mean any- 



60 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

thing, they signify that Dr. Fosdick does not re- 
gard the Christian religion as a final revelation, but 
as a transient and changeful product evoked from 
the religious spirit of man, and that this process 
of evolution has not yet reached its goal, but will 
continue to cast its mutable products through all 
the generations to come. Our Christianity, accord- 
ing to this agile doctor, is different from that of 
our fathers, and the Christianity of our children 
will differ from ours, and theirs in turn will differ 
from that of their children and children's children. 
St. Paul seems to have foreseen that there would be 
men of this sort, but he does not seem to have ap- 
proved them. He speaks of them in this wise : 'Ever- 
learning and never able to come to the knowledge 
of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres with- 
stood Moses, so do these also resist the truth : men 
of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith/ " 
Well said; but I doubt if Dr. Fosdick believes 
that St. Paul wrote the Second Epistle to Timothy, 
from which the Bishop quotes. And, then, who was 
St. Paul anyhow, but a good man, honestly living 
up to the light he had, but who has been left far 
behind in the progress we have made ! That is the 
modern view of St. Paul. Put over against Fos- 
dick's idea of Christianity not being "a finished 
article," and Babson's economic conception of re- 
ligion, St. Paul's tremendous statement in his 
Epistle to the Galatians. Nobody doubts that he 
wrote this Epistle — not even the higher critics in 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 61 

Chicago and Yale, Emory and Dallas ! Look : "But 
though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any 
other gospel unto you than that which we have 
preached unto you, let him be accursed." And as 
if to emphasise it, and make it unmistakably clear, 
he repeats it: "As we said before, so say I now 
again, if any man preach any other gospel unto 
you than that ye have received, let him be ac- 
cursed!" That looks to me like St. Paul believed 
Christianity is a "finished" thing, and intended us 
to believe it, and put a curse on us if we do not ! 

All of this "liberalism" goes back to the root 
of Rationalism, the system of thought that rejects 
the supernatural and explains "revealed religion" 
according to the principles of human reason. It is 
superficial and evanescent. It will not shake "the 
Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," but it will 
destroy the faith of many. You would not put your 
money in a bank of doubtful integrity, and you 
are not likely to "leave all and follow" Christ if 
his religion is an uncertain thing. Such a concep- 
tion of Christianity would never have given us 
"the noble army of martyrs," whose blood became 
"the seed of the Church." 

The time has come again, as it has often come 
before in the history of the Church, when we must 
make a decision whether we will believe the Bible 
to be the inspired word of God, or a mere collection 
of human records, interesting relics of an ancient 
and obsolete type of religion. In whatever way 



62 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

you test the modern theory of the Bible, it fails 
to establish itself as truth. Its internal evidence 
breaks down, and its "pragmatic sanction" gives way 
at the touch of reason. It is a vast system of error, 
and one risks the ruin of the infinite interests of the 
soul who ventures to build his life upon its rickety 
foundations. 

William James was right; this modern theory of 
the Bible has given us "a new sort of religion of 
nature." But the ancient and imperishable view of 
the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God 
gives us a supernatural religion; a gospel that is 
"the power of God unto salvation" ; a Christian ex- 
perience that is the witness of the Spirit with our 
spirit that we are the children of God; and a bap- 
tism of the Holy Ghost for service that inspires a 
flaming zeal and endues us with celestial power! 
The whole ministry of the apostles, and especially 
of St. Paul, was a long and uncompromising con- 
flict with false religion; but the truth they pro- 
claimed blasted the foundations of Paganism, 
toppled into the dust never to rise again the temples 
of Diana and the proud shrines of Jupiter Ammon, 
silenced the babbling oracles of Delphi and Dodona, 
and the dark cavern of the Cumean Sybil, and scat- 
tered their vain philosophies to the winds! How 
any one who knows what mighty influence resided in 
the apostolic doctrine of the gospel as the "power 
of God," and the imperial sweep of its triumph in 
the Roman Empire, can exchange the supernatural 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 63 

religion of the old Bible for "the new sort of religion 
of nature" offered us by the higher critics, passes 
understanding! This "new sort of religion" is as 
impotent to cast out demons as the sons of Sceva: 
"Then certain vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon 
them to call over them which had evil spirits the 
name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you 
by Jesus whom Paul preacheth. And there were 
seven sons of one Sceva a Jew, and chief of the 
priests, which did so. And the evil spirit answered 
and said, Jesus, I know, and Paul I know ; but who 
are ye? And the man in whom the evil spirit was 
leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed 
against them, so that they fled out of that house, 
naked and wounded. And this was known to all 
the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus ; and 
fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord 
Jesus was magnified." (Acts xix, 13-17.) There 
you see the difference between the old-time religion 
and "the new religion of nature," propounded by 
the higher critic. There is "power" in the old; but 
none in the new. The old faith casts out devils; 
the new flees, naked and wounded, and leaves the 
field to the foe. 

The deep wide river of life, which all must cross, 
rolls before you. Two bridges are thrown across 
this foaming flood. One of them is built of wood. 
Its timbers are of uncertain strength and constantly 
need repair. It is reared on slender supports, and 



64 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

the engineers at work on it tell you that the defective 
material put into it renders it of doubtful safety. 
Its floor is laid with decaying planks and here and 
there wide gaps imperil those who attempt to cross 
upon it. Many have fallen through, and been swept 
away in the roaring current below. This bridge is 
the modern Bible. As you approach, the higher 
critic points you to the bridge, but evades your 
question as to its security! 

The other bridge is built of steel that has been 
tested in the fires. It was put together by inspired 
workmen. It is reared on concrete pillars that rest 
on a foundation of adamant. Its massive beams 
and solid girders are riveted with bolts made in 
heaven. Its floor is a pavement of stone, worn 
smooth by the passage of innumerable travellers to 
that bourne whence none ever returns. It never 
needs repair, nor has any ever had occasion to dis- 
trust its strength. It is lighted from end to end 
with brilliant arcs, and the farther end opens upon 
the gate of Pearl in the city of God. Storms, and 
floods, and earthquakes have failed to shake its 
immovable frame! Millions of souls in glory now 
have safely crossed the flood, and millions more 
still on the way will find it just as safe! This 
bridge is the old, old Bible that our mothers loved. 
Which will you choose? 

I will close this message with a quotation from a 
lecture on the Bible by the Rev. W. E. Munsey, 
D. D. And remember, he is not speaking of the 



MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 65 

mass of mutilated and fragmentary documents of 
the higher critic, but of the venerable and sacred 
volume from which his mother taught him in child- 
hood amid the Virginia mountains! 

"No book has been so fiercely attacked in every 
age as the Bible. And after its teachings had con- 
quered the civilisation of the world, and that civili- 
sation became professedly Christian, that civilisation 
went over to the devil, and the church itself tried 
to burn up all the Bibles in the world; but Church 
and State, infidel and pagan, criminal and philos- 
opher, have all failed to destroy it. The Bible is 
no feeble child begging in the streets of our Vanity 
Fair; but it is a lofty giant, his mother Love, his 
father God, and his strides over toppling thrones 
and down the ages have awakened the dead! He 
shakes thunders from his flowing hair, and his 
armour shines like the sun. The breath of God was 
the furnace blast, and Horeb's top the anvil, when 
Jehovah forged his helmet, breastplate and buckler; 
and the infant Jesus gave him a sword out of 
heaven's armoury; and while John fell worshipping, 
the stars danced in the sky to the song of the angels, 
when this giant was commissioned to take the world ! 
Kill him? Kill an archangel? Kill the Lord of 
Glory again? Kill God? Priest and infidel, get 
out of the way! God's eternal truth owns the 
eternal years, and the Bible will yet be the code of 
all nations, the arbiter of all questions, the referee 
in all disputes, the grand court of appeal for the 



66 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

world, and the Bible and Jesus will be king of the 
world ! Go on, blessed old Book ! Let wicked men 
scoff. Go on, and teach the rich man how to use 
his wealth and the poor man how to be happy in his 
cabin — teach all men the way of salvation; and when 
we die give us a promise and hope of immortality, 
and kindle a light in our graves which all hell can- 
not blow out — and you will have done for us what 
all the" world's philosophy never dreamed of !" 



" Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions 
which ye have been taught." (2. Thess. 2, 15.) 



II 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN 
SCIENCE 



II 

GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN SCIENCE 

WE enter the Bible through the first chapter 
of Genesis. It is one of the noblest docu- 
ments in the literature of mankind. It 
rises like a magnificent arch over the cradle of crea- 
tion, glorious in its beauty and imperishable 
strength. It is constructed out of scientific truth, 
each truth a solid pearl brought from the depths 
of eternity and lifted to its place by the mighty 
force of inspiration. Its lofty keystone blazes with 
the ineffable inscription : "In the beginning God," — 
and all that follows is only the logical unfolding of 
that primal truth. The walls of this mighty arch- 
way into the temple of divine knowledge flame with 
gems of truth that reveal the love of God in the 
creation of man. Here on the very entrance to 
the Bible, we find the great fundamental truths of 
our faith indelibly inscribed : the existence of God ; 
the unity of God ; the personality of God ; the wis- 
dom, power and goodness of God; the government 
of God ; the fundamental order of nature ; the origin, 
of man; the free agency of man, with its mighty 
implications; the sovereignty of man over all ter- 
restrial nature; the mission of man on the earth; 

69 



;o MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

and the broad and indestructible basis of optimism 
in the declaration of God that all things are gocxL 

The message of the first chapter of Genesis is that 
"all's law and all's love" in the universe. When we 
look at nature through this great arch, the tiniest 
flower at our feet and the mightiest sun flaming in 
the depths of space alike declare the all-embracing 
love of God, and the glory of His power. We do 
not read these meanings into the first chapter of 
Genesis from later knowledge. They were there 
from the first, the elemental verities of all religion, 
and all science, and all philosophy, and the immu- 
table foundations of a rational faith. He was right 
who said that "the first leaf of the Mosaic records 
has more weight than all the folios of men of 
science and philosophers.' ' It gives us a vast out- 
look upon life. 

In his book, Keynote Studies in Keynote Books 
of the Bible? Dr. Alphonzo Smith says : "No single 
chapter in the Old Testament so impresses me with 
its inherent greatness as the first chapter of Genesis. 
Some of the Psalms and a few chapters in Isaiah 
strike a note of higher rhapsody. In sheer intel- 
lectuality the twentieth chapter of Exodus goes be- 
yond it. But in its blend of beauty and power, in 
the recurrent beat of its planetary rhythms, in the 
consciousness of a great truth adequately embodied 
at last, in a certain proud disdain of all embellish- 

1 Keynote Studies, etc., p. 34. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 71 

ment except that which attends unsolicited upon 
great thought greatly expressed, the first chapter of 
Genesis seems to me alone and unapproached. . . . 
"This chapter abolished mythology throughout 
the civilised world. There were doubtless mytholog- 
ical germs among the Hebrews themselves; but this 
chapter sterilised them. Latin, Greek, Norse and 
Oriental mythology lived on for a while; but the 
warrant of dispossession had been served, and gods 
and goddesses, demigods and demigoddesses, naiads 
and dryads and hamadryads, all had to go. Some 
of them found refuge in poetry and romance ; some 
in the ornament and complement of oratory; some 
in the metaphors and smiles of rhetoric. But in 
exact proportion as the first great thought of the 
Bible had free circulation among races and nations 
the big gods and the little gods were doomed. 
Mythology became a mere toy of the mind. The 
preface to the Bible had throned one God as the 
maker and preserver of all. It served as a sort of 
cosmic Monroe Doctrine announcing to all the old 
deities that any attempt on their part to extend their 
system to any portion of the universe would hence- 
forth be considered dangerous to the well-being of 
mankind. It had its effect. The dignity and au- 
thoritativeness of the announcement, the splendour 
of the vision it unfolded, the instant appeal it made 
to what we now call intuitional probability, marked 
the inauguration of a new era in human thought. 
There is in fact nothing finer in the Old Testament 



72 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

than the way in which the author of the first 
chapter of Genesis takes the elemental timbers of 
the world and cleans them of all the incrustations 
that had gathered upon them. Earth, water, night, 
sun, moon, stars, — think what Greek and Roman 
intellects had done with these, how buried they were 
beneath the sediment of bizarre fancy and grotesque 
history. There is not a verse in this chapter that 
does not by its mere omissions register an altitude 
of spirit immeasurably beyond all that had gone 
before." 

This testimony is true. And it is a fine estimate 
of the intellectual grandeur and spiritual value of 
the entrance to God's Westminster Abbey. The 
glory of the interior will be found to correspond 
to the majestic beauty of the entrance. One has 
only to read the first chapter of Genesis along with 
the Chaldean and Babylonian narratives of creation, 
and the mythology of all the peoples of antiquity, 
to realise the enormous difference between them, 
and cannot help asking himself the question, how 
are we to explain the fact that the Hebrews alone 
of all the ancient people attained to such rational 
ideas ? In his book, Christ and Science, Dr. Francis 
H. Smith says : 1 "Contrast with the simplicity, the 
clearness, the scientific parallelism of the Bibical 
account, that of the so-called Babylonian Creation 
Tablets. Their utterances are nebulous and vague; 
often so obscure that one may find in them what he 

1 Christ and Science, p. 127. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 73 

brings to them. One of them makes beasts the first 
creation; another puts man at the beginning, and 
their order is incomplete and unscientific. . . . The 
writer of the first chapter of Genesis shows a cor- 
respondence, not with the science of his time, but 
with that of three thousand years later, which the 
accepted doctrine of probabilities makes it impos- 
sible to attribute to a fortunate guess." Everything 
found in the vast collection of clay tablets in the 
Royal Library of Assyria not only confirms the 
truth of the Bible, but makes it clear that the first 
chapter of Genesis stands at the head of the litera- 
ture of the world. "It still speaks to us/' says E. 
Griffith Jones, "as no other record of the origin 
of things can do. It strikes a higher and more 
august note; it plumbs lower depths of feeling; it 
finds us in a more secret place of the soul, than 
anything that ancient philosophers or modern scien- 
tists can tell us. Neither Homer nor Hesiod, Anax- 
agoras nor Lucretius, Assyrian tablet nor Egyptian 
hieroglyphic, Acadian myth nor Sanscrit folklore, 
any more than the speculations of Spencer or Dar- 
win, Huxley or Haeckel, can touch the sonorous 
chords — 'like the sound of a great Amen' — that 
vibrate through these grand and pregnant sen- 
tences." * 

The first chapter of Genesis is poetical in its 
structure. It is translated as prose in our English 

1 The Ascent Through Christ, p. 73. 



74 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

Bible; but it is poetry, and has the literary form of 
poetry in the original Hebrew. Its stately style, its 
parallelisms, its rhythms, its refrains, its unity within 
itself, the nervous energy of its thought, and the 
picturesque symbolism of its conceptions, all show 
that it is a poem. Dr. B. F. Cocker says: "It 
combines with lyric breadth of treatment and state- 
liness of movement all the compactness of a 'solemn 
sonnet freighted with a single thought from begin- 
ning to end/ Analysis of its interior structure ex- 
hibits a most artificial synthesis, founded upon well- 
known sacred numbers. It has, first, an Exordium, 
the proemial part. Then it is articulated into six 
Strophes. Finally there is the Epode, or peroration. 
The six strophes separate naturally into two groups, 
in which there is a balance and correlation of parts 
celebrating the first three and the last three con- 
cordant steps in the creative movement — the Strophe 
and the Antiseptic." x 

Poetry is the earliest and the highest form of 
human thought. It is the language of emotion, 
which is the first and deepest expression of our 
nature. Prose is the language of reflective thought; 
poetry the language of the heart; and the Bible 
speaks from the heart to the heart. 

" Not from a vain or shallow thought 
His awful Jove young Phidias brought; 
Never from lips of cunning fell 
The thrilling Delphic oracle ; 

1 The Theistic Conception of the World, p. 139. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 75 

Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old; 
The litanies of nations came, 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, — 
The canticles of love and woe." 1 

The Bible teems with poetry, lofty and clear, and 
vivid in its imaginative realism, full of fire and 
noble spirituality of thought. It is intellectual 
poetry, the profoundest conceptions of the mind 
fused in the crucible of religious passion, and poured 
out in fiery streams of truth. The first chapter 
of Genesis is a magnificent hymn of creation. 

But the first chapter of Genesis is not simply 
the language of imaginative thought. It is what 
is called "didactic poetry," poetry that is intended to 
teach ; it is history and science poetically expressed. 
We must not carry the theory of its symbolical char- 
acter to the extent of denying that it is a narrative 
in broad outline of actual processes of divine power 
in bringing into existence, and shaping into its final 
form, the material universe ; for, as I shall endeavour 
to show, its statements conform to our modern 
scientific conceptions. It is wonderful for its brev- 
ity, its simplicity, its comprehensiveness, its funda- 
mental agreement with modern science, the com- 
pleteness of the picture it presents, and the sus- 
tained dignity of its thought. The creation legends 
of all other nations are full of childish and absurd 
ideas, as grotesque as they are unreasonable; but 

1 Emerson, The Problem. 



76 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

there is not a thought in the first chapter of Genesis 
that it is not worthy of the Deity whose work it 
describes. 

Every document must be interpreted in the light 
of its design. The design of the first chapter of 
Genesis is not to teach science, but to reveal God 
as the author of nature. "It says nothing about the 
forces of nature, the laws of nature, the classifica- 
tions of natural history, or the size, positions, dis- 
tances, and motions of the heavenly bodies. From 
first to last every phenomenon and every law is 
linked immediately to some act or command of 
God. It is God who creates, God who commands, 
God who names, God who approves, and God who 
blesses. Strike out the allusions to God, and the 
narrative is meaningless. Clearly it was never in- 
tended to teach science. It has obviously one pur- 
pose, to revea 1 and keep before the minds of men 
the grand truth that Jehovah is the sole creator 
and Lord of the heavens and the earth; and it 
leaves the scientific comprehension of nature to the 
natural powers with which God has endowed man 
for that end. . . . While we hold that there are no 
untimely anticipations of scientific discovery in Gen- 
esis, yet we expect that when scientific discoveries 
are made, the congruity and dignity of the moral 
and religious lesson shall not be defeated and 
marred. Nay, more, we maintain that the Mosaic 
cosmogony presents the great principles which really 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 77 

lie at the basis of a truly scientific interpretation of 
nature.' ' 1 The great contribution Moses made to 
the thought of mankind in the first chapter of Gen- 
esis was the theistic conception of the world. 

But this does not mean that the author of the 
first chapter of Genesis gave us an unscientific ac- 
count of creation. The modern theory of the Bible 
teaches that the first chapter of Genesis is in con- 
flict with modern science. Dr. J. A. Rice says the 
answers given in Genesis to questions about the 
origin of things "conflict directly with our modern 
scientific conceptions," and that "we have now aban- 
doned the effort to harmonise the two, for to do so is 
to juggle with plain facts." 2 

That is a frank, but serious, statement. Let us 
examine it: Over against this dogmatic assertion 
of the Higher Critic we might put the statement 
of Dr. Alphonzo Smith, who says : "It is to my 
mind one of the strangest ironies of history that 
this (first) chapter (of Genesis) should be singled 
out as distinctively unscientific. It is the one chap- 
ter in the Bible that has made science possible. It 
is the magna charta of science. There was no 
science, and there could be no science, until men 
recognised that unity, order and progression are 
inherent in nature's processes. How were men 
brought to this recognition ? Two routes were pos- 

1 The Theistic Conception of the World, pp. 136, 137. 

2 The Old Testament in the Life of the World To-day, p. 136. 



JrS MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

sible; (i) They could accept the unity, order, and 
progression of Genesis, and on this presupposition 
proceed to verification; (2) without knowledge of 
or belief in Genesis they could experiment independ- 
ently, and thus arrive by induction at a knowledge 
of the orderliness or potential science inherent in 
nature. Now the history of science proves unmis- 
takably that the first method was that actually fol- 
lowed. The founders of modern science, those on 
whom the great nineteenth century scientists built, 
were Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Harvey, and Newton. 
These men believed that there was 'mind/ 'thought/ 
'Almighty power/ 'design/ intelligence,' 'an intel- 
ligent Agent' in nature. They believed it, not be- 
cause they had proved it; proof came later. They 
believed it because Genesis affirmed it." x If it 
should be objected that Dr. Smith is a specialist 
in the field of English literature, and is not a 
scientist, the retort might be easily made that Dr. 
Rice is a specialist in the field of Biblical literature, 
and is not a scientist. 

To put the matter at rest let me quote from one 
who is a master of science, as well as a life-long stu- 
dent of the Bible, so that one hardly knows which to 
admire most, his intimate knowledge of nature, or his 
profound acquaintance with Holy Scripture, — Dr. 
Francis H. Smith, nomen clarum et venerabile, for 
fifty years Professor of Natural Science in the Uni- 
versity of Virginia. When invited to deliver the Cole 

1 Keynote Studies in Keynote Books, etc., pp. 45, 46. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 79 

Lectures at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Smith took as 
his subject "Christ and Science,'' and we might offer 
his whole book in refutation of the idea that there 
is any serious conflict between the Bible and Science. 
But he expressly says that "the writer of the first 
chapter of Genesis shows a correspondence not with 
the science of his time, but with that of three thou- 
sand years later/' 1 that is, with the science of 
to-day. Dr. Rice, the literary critic, says that the 
attempt to show a harmony between the Mosaic 
account of creation and modern science is to "juggle 
with plain facts." Dr. Smith, the scientist, says 
the Mosaic account shows a correspondence with 
modern science. Any one who studied science under 
Dr. Francis H. Smith, one of the most conscientious 
of teachers, will smile at the idea that he "juggled 
with plain facts" ! 

By the way, of all the expert jugglers with 
"plain facts" on the face of this terrestrial globe, 
the Higher Critics of the Bible are the champions. 
Alexander the Great was very fond of the artist, 
Apelles, and frequently visited his studio. One day 
he so exposed his ignorance in discussing art, that 
Apelles gave him a polite hint to change the subject, 
as the boys who were grinding the colours were 
laughing at him ! The story is suggestive. My own 
studies have led me to believe that there is a funda- 
mental agreement between the Mosaic account of 
creation and our modern scientific conceptions ; and 

1 Christ and Science, p. iaf . 



80 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

this substantial harmony between the Bible and 
modern science greatly strengthens my faith, for it 
strikes the roots of our religion deep into the con- 
stitution of the world. I do not profess to speak as 
a scientist, and have not forgotten, as a theologian, 
the classic adage: "Ne sutor ultra crepidatn" — let 
the cobbler stick to his last. Nor am I afraid to 
face the issue if it should go against my claim that 
modern science confirms the Mosaic narrative; for 
my faith rests on immutable foundations of Chris- 
tian experience. It is a question of fact : Does the 
account of creation given in the first chapter of 
Genesis conflict with modern science? Are we 
juggling with facts when we seek to harmonise the 
two accounts? It was a profound observation of 
Bacon that "Truth is more readily derived from 
error than from confusion." Cicero said that one 
of the most essential things in debate is clearness of 
definition. Heavy fogs abound in these latitudes, 
and many a craft has come to grief through losing 
its bearings. Let us look at some highly important 
preliminary considerations, — take our bearings as 
it were, and start right by defining our "modern 
scientific conceptions." 

First, what is science? Science is the knowledge 
of facts — facts that can be demonstrated by obser- 
vation or actual experiment. "It is the essence of 
science," said Sir William Thomson, one of the 
most distinguished of the British scientists, "to infer 
antecedent conditions, and anticipate future evolu- 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 81 

tions, from phenomena which have actually come 
under observation." According to this, nothing can 
strictly be called science of which we cannot affirm 
that we know it to be true. 

Second: Every scientific fact is surrounded by a 
wide zone of undiscovered truth. It is in this zone 
of speculation that all conflicts between religion and 
science have occurred. It is therefore of the highest 
importance to keep this distinction in mind. Illus- 
trations of this difference between real science and 
scientific conjecture are numberless. One of the 
highest authorities on the subject of ether, that 
fairy-land in which the scientific imagination revels 
and rears such fantastic creations out of atoms and 
molecules and electrons and "ions," was the famous 
Clerk-Maxwell. 1 He reached the conclusion by 
purely theoretical reasoning that a ray of light 
exerts a pressure on the object it strikes. But this 
was theory until an eminent scientist in Europe, and 
two distinguished American scientists, by simul- 
taneous, but independent, experiment demonstrated 
it to be a fact. It is a fact that the anatomical struc- 
ture of all the vertebrate animals is on the same gen- 
eral plan; but that the various species of animals 
have been developed from each other is not science, 
but speculation. And so on through a whole world 
of mystery, suggested by the terms radium, radio- 
activity, argon, neon, krypton, Mendelism, Zeeman 
effect, and countless more. 

1 Miracles of Science, p. no. 



82 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

Third: The object of science is to find out the 
method of nature. If we ask any scientist, let it be 
a scientist who is also a Christian, like Sir Oliver 
Lodge, or an atheist, like Ernest Haeckel, what is 
the method by which nature works, they will both 
promptly answer that nature works by the method 
of Evolution. But when you pronounce the word 
"Evolution" you excite a perfect babble of debate 
among the scientists themselves. Whose Evolution 
do you mean, the Evolution of Darwin, or the Evo- 
lution of De Vries? The Evolution of Wallace, or 
the Evolution of Weissmann ? There are almost as 
many varieties of Evolution as there are scientists 
and some of them are violent in their opinions. 
One of them says Darwin must be put out of court. 
"We stand," he says, "on the eve of a scientific 
bankruptcy whose consequences are as yet incalcu- 
lable. Darwinism is to be stricken from the list of 
scientific theories." x It may be unscientific and 
intemperate language to say, as an eminent scientist 
does, that "The whole enormous intellectual labour 
(of Darwin) was in vain" ; but it proves that science 
has not yet laid down the routes across the myste- 
rious sea of Evolution, and that it is a hazardous 
thing to sail amidst these fogs. In the light of 
such uncertainty, or rather in the absence of light, 
it is evident that the idea of man's descent from an 
ape ancestry remains what Kant called it, "a daring 
adventure of the reason." 
1 The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, p. 126. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 83 

"Meantime," says Drummond, "all prudent men 
can do no other than hold their judgment in sus- 
pense, both as to the specific theory of one depart- 
ment of Evolution which is called Darwinism, and 
as to the factors and causes of Evolution itself. No 
one asks more of Evolution at present than permis- 
sion to use it as a working theory. . . . While many 
of the details of the theory of Evolution are in the 
crucible of criticism, and while the field of modern 
science changes with such rapidity that in almost 
every department the text-books of ten years ago are 
obsolete to-day, it is fair to add that no one of these 
changes, nor all of them together, have touched 
the general theory itself except to establish its 
strength, its value, and its universality." x Christian 
faith has nothing to lose, but much to gain, by ac- 
cepting the scientific principle of Evolution. In 
its broad conception it is the scientific equivalent 
of the theological doctrine of the immanence of 
God in nature, a conception as old as the Bible 
itself. 

"In any discussion of the relations of scientific and 
religious thought," says Simpson, "Evolution will 
find a place if only because of its potency as a 
unifying agent in the world of data. The concep- 
tion of the unity of knowledge naturally suggests 
the idea of foundation lines along which this stately 
temple shall be built. Such a foundation line is 
Evolution, extending so far as is known through 
1 The Ascent of Man, pp. 6, 7. 



84 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

every department of knowledge, and offering a 
beautiful^ example of the mutual benefit to one 
another of the scientific and the theological out- 
looks on God and the world. ... In Evolution men 
have come to perceive God's method of creation in 
time, even as gravitation deals with the relations 
of things in space.' , 1 Evolution, properly under- 
stood, does not separate nature from God, but 
brings God into nature, so that what we call natural 
law is but the mode of the divine activity. "The 
affirmation of natural laws," says Simpson, "is the 
affirmation of something more than a series of 
sequences; it is the acknowledgment of a persistent 
and sustaining cause of these sequences which we 
are driven to find in the divine energy itself — energy 
expressive of and emanating from the Divine will." 
We may leave the problem of Evolution to the 
scientists, confident that whatever solution they may 
discover it will confirm and establish the truth of 
religion. 

Meantime it will help us to maintain a kind and 
sympathetic attitude toward science to remember 
the words of Sir E. Ray Lankester in a Presidential 
Address to the British Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science: "Men of science," he said, "seek 
in all reverence to discover the Almighty, the Ever- 
lasting. They claim sympathy and friendship with 
those who, like themselves, have turned away from 
the more material struggles of human life, and have 
1 The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, p. 126. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 85 

set their hearts and minds on the knowledge of the 
Eternal." Evolution is certainly one of our "mod- 
ern scientific conceptions." Does Genesis conflict 
with it? 

While the details of the theory of Evolution 
are still in "the crucible of criticism," the gen- 
eral conception of the principle is clear, and it is 
with that that we have to deal in this discussion. 
All are agreed that Evolution is, first, a gradual, 
and not an instantaneous process. Second, it is a 
consecutive, and not a disconnected, process. Pro- 
fessor Le Conte called it, "a continuous progres- 
sive change." It is a development or unfolding, a 
process in which what comes after comes out of 
what has gone before, and has the relation of cause 
and effect. Third, it is a cumulative process, a 
process of growth from within, of progress from 
little to more, from simple to complex, from a lower 
to a higher order. Fourth, it is a harmonious 
process, a process in which all the details combine to 
produce a rational result. I will add a fifth fact 
about Evolution, to which it seems to me the scien- 
tists do not attach sufficient importance in their dis- 
cussion of it, and that is, it is a process that develops 
a design that was in the process from the beginning. 
Evolution is essentially teleological. "Creative Evo^ 
lution" is a contradiction of terms. Evolution 
creates nothing. It only brings out a predetermined 
end. You can only evolve what is involved. 

We see all of this going on in nature all around 



86 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

us. Take the massive oak under whose shade you 
love to sit when the sun is hot; it is the evolution 
of the acorn — the gradual, consecutive, cumulative, 
and harmonious unfolding of the design of the oak 
tree. This does not mean that the whole oak tree, 
the huge trunk, and the limbs, and branches, and 
twigs, and countless leaves, were in the acorn in an 
embryo form; but it means that there was a vital 
principle in the acorn that caused it to take up the 
chemical elements of the soil, and atmosphere, and 
sunlight, and mould them into an oak tree. And 
that design was in the acorn from the first, and 
was an essential attribute of it. It was the im- 
mutable law of its nature to grow into an oak, and 
not into a pine tree. Within certain limits it is pos- 
sible fry artificial methods to modify these effects, 
as Burbank has demonstrated in the botanical 
world ; but by no means can nature be tortured into 
violating her fundamental laws. A chicken is al- 
ways hatched from the tgg of a chicken, and by 
no sort of biological juggling can you hatch a pony 
out of a turkey egg, or get a canary bird from the 
egg of an eagle. Design, or purpose, is the basic 
principle of Evolution. 

Evolution as thus defined is but a diagram of the 
rational processes of the mind. Its principles are 
the laws of thought. It is a process that conforms 
to the fundamental activities of human conscious- 
ness. So when we say that nature works by the 
method of Evolution, we simply say that nature is 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 87 

rational, and works by the method of intelligence. 
And let us do Darwin justice. He was not an 
atheist, or responsible for the abuse of his theory. 
He says : * "There is a grandeur in this view of 
life, with its several powers, having been originally 
breathed by the Creator [Italics ours] into a few 
forms, or into one; and that whilst this planet has 
gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of 
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms 
most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and 
are being evolved." Perhaps so, but that "view 
of life" is now largely disproven. 

A brief glance at the general subject of Evolu- 
tion was necessary to our discussion of the question 
whether the Mosaic account of creation given in the 
first chapter of Genesis is in conflict with our mod- 
ern scientific conceptions. I now proceed to show 
that the Mosaic account, without pretending to be a 
scientific document, is in remarkable harmony with 
modern science. Bear in mind that Moses wrote in 
broad outline, and with the distinct purpose of 
giving the necessary background for the history 
of the human race, its fall into sin, and its redemp- 
tion in Christ. Yet note the correspondence of the 
Genesis narrative with our "modern scientific con- 
ceptions." 

First: Science says the world was made by a 
gradual process; so does Genesis. Admit the exist- 

1 Origin of Species, p. 429. 



88 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

ence of God, and, of course, He might have made 
the world in an instant. I say He might have done 
it as a mere exercise of power; but no attribute of 
the Deity has been more misunderstood and abused 
than His omnipotence. God is omnipotent, but His 
power is never exerted irrationally, and to create 
such a world as this world in an instant of time 
would be an irrational act. God is not a magician, 
but Infinite Reason. As a matter of fact, Genesis 
tells us that God was six days in making the world ; 
so that if you take the term "day" to mean a period 
of twenty-four hours, it would still be a gradual 
work. Possibly Moses was thinking of six literal 
days ; but if he was the Holy Spirit guided him in 
writing to use a word that not only means a literal 
period of twenty-four hours, but also indefinite 
time. Every intelligent person knows that the term 
"day" is used in the Bible for indefinite time. Jesus 
told the Jews, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to 
see my day." He meant that Abraham foresaw the 
period of time which we call the Christian era, and 
which has now lasted for nearly two thousand years. 
Some have charged that this construction of the 
term day has been forced on the theologians by 
modern science, in their effort to harmonise Genesis 
and Geology; but they are mistaken, for it is the in- 
terpretation given by Augustine, and Origen, and 
Basil, and all the early Church scholars, ages be- 
fore modern science was born. There is simply no 
conflict at this point. Moses said creation was a 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 89 

gradual process; and modern science confirms his 
account. 

Second: Science says that the world was made 
by a consecutive, or progressive, process; so does 
Genesis. We have seen that the whole subject of 
the nature of Evolution is still in debate; and that 
such eminent scientists as Darwin and Alfred Rus- 
sell Wallace held opposite views about the particular 
method of Evolution. Moses deals only in broad 
outlines, but his account of creation shows as clearly 
as any scientific scheme a closely linked succession of 
biological events, the nature of whose connection 
is the subject of scientific investigation. There is 
a regular advancement in the Genesis account, just 
such as we find in the record of the rocks and the 
researches of the naturalist. There is no conflict 
at this point, but a general correspondence between 
the outline of science and the Bible. 

Third: Science says the world was made by a 
cumulative process; so does Genesis. It grew from 
less to more, from simple to complex, from inor- 
ganic to organic, from mineral to vegetable, from 
vegetable to animal, from the lower order of ani- 
mals to man. And it grew by means of what Dr. 
Le Conte called "resident forces, ,, i. e., vital energies 
within the organism itself, not by mechanical forces 
acting on it from without. Moses only reveals the 
origin of these "resident forces" in the will of God. 
You may take any chart of the physical history of 



90 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

the earth as disclosed by geology, and you will find 
that the Genesis account parallels it. The order in 
Genesis is the same that science affirms of nature; 
the inorganic precedes the organic, the vegetable 
the animal, the lower animals the higher, and all 
culminate in man. Science gives us first an age of 
formless matter; so does Genesis. "And the earth 
was without form and void.'' Science gives us next 
an age of fire, a luminiferous ether, quivering with 
radiant energy and molecular activity; so does 
Genesis : "And God said, Let there be light." And 
what is most wonderful, Moses describes this ac- 
tivity as caused by the Spirit of God moving upon 
the vapours; thus anticipating the profound concep- 
tion of modern theistic science, which affirms that 
all force in the final analysis is spirit-force. Science 
gives us next an age of atmosphere, when the cool- 
ing and condensing vapours assumed an aeriform 
condition, and there was a division of the solid and 
liquid elements under the action of gravity, pro- 
ducing an expanse, or firmament; so does Genesis. 
Science gives us next an age of rain, when the 
oceans were gathered together, and the dry land 
appeared; so does Genesis. 

Science gives us next an age of plant life, when 
bioplasm, or the lowest form of vitalised matter, 
made its appearance ; so does Genesis. Science says 
that in the physical history of the globe it was 
shrouded for a long period in a dense mass of 
cloud or steam; but in the course of its development 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 91 

the skies cleared, and the heavenly bodies became 
visible; so does Genesis. It is superficial criticism 
that says according to Moses the sun was "created" 
after the earth. Moses had already affirmed that 
"in the beginning God created the heaven," using 
the universal term, and "the earth," putting the 
earth after the heaven. Obviously he meant by 
God's making "two great lights," not only to re- 
affirm that God created these heavenly bodies, then 
the object of heathen worship, but also to say that 
they did not become visible until a comparatively 
late period, and this is exactly what science says 
about them. Science says that in the biological his- 
tory of the world animal life began with the order of 
fishes, and that molluscs came before fishes, fishes 
before reptiles, reptiles before birds, birds before 
animals, and animals before man; so does Genesis. 
I find no conflict with our modern scientific con- 
ceptions here, but fundamental harmony. And re- 
member that Moses said all of this three thousand 
years before science found it out! 

Fourth: Science says the world was made by a 
harmonious, or orderly process; so does Genesis. 
If we trace the physical history of the globe back 
far enough, according to the geological record, we 
reach a period when it was a mass of glowing, fiery 
matter. "At the temperature which would fuse 
the mass of the rocks, all the more volatile sub- 
stances could only exist in the form of an elastic 



92 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

vapour surrounding the earth. All the carbon in the 
world must have existed in the form of carbonic 
acid; all the sulphur as sulphurous acid; all the 
chlorine as chlorhydric acid; all the water as an 
invisible elastic vapour, extending out beyond the 
limits of the present atmosphere. There could 
hence be upon the earth no vegetation, no animals, 
no limestone, no salt, no gypsum, no water. All 
that we now behold must have been represented by 
a glowing liquid nucleus, enveloped in a dense at- 
mosphere of burning acrid vapours. Here was 
chaos." 1 If we could have looked upon it then, 
we could have seen little, or nothing to suggest the 
world we now live in; and yet order, and beauty, 
and life, and all the infinite details of the world as 
we know it to-day were "germinating in the heart of 
universal discord." This is the testimony of science, 
and Genesis says the same thing, and brings a cos- 
mos out of a chaos, a world which shows design, 
order, and beauty out of a primeval earth that was 
"without form and void." 

Finally: Science says that man was the ideal 
toward which nature worked from the beginning; 
so does Genesis. "From this pinnacle of matter," 
says Drummond, "is seen at last what matter is for, 
and all the lower lives that ever lived appear as but 
the scaffolding for this final work. The whole sub- 
human universe finds its reason for existence in its 

^-Winchell, Sketches of Creation, p. 49. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 93 

last creation, its final justification in the new im- 
material order which opened with its close. . . . 
Plant and animal each have their end, but man is 
the end of all ends. The latest science reinstates 
him, where poet and philosopher had already placed 
him, as at once the crown, the master, and the ra- 
tionale of creation." x Any one who reads the first 
chapter of Genesis must see that Moses had placed 
man as "the crown, and master, and rationale of 
creation" ages before philosopher, or poet, or mod- 
ern scientist had enthroned him as "the end of all 
ends." Modern science has only illuminated his 
progress to the throne. The poet has only expressed 
the heart of the first chapter of Genesis when he 
sings in stately rhyme : 

" From harmony to harmony this universal frame began ; 
From harmony to harmony through all the compass of its 
notes it ran, 
The diapason closing full in man." 

So far we fail to find any conflict between Genesis 
and our modern scientific conceptions, but on the 
contrary, a remarkable correspondence. We pause 
here to ask, how else than upon the theory of in- 
spiration, in the sense of a supernatural influence 
on the mind of the sacred writer that held him un- 
consciously to the fundamental truth of nature, can 
you explain how Moses understood what it has taken 
science more than three thousand years to discover? 
Is not this fundamental harmony a profound proof 

1 The Ascent of Man, p. 114. 



94 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

of the vital unity between nature and revelation? 
Was not the great Kepler right when, as he studied 
the heavens, he exclaimed, "I think thy thoughts, O 
God!" Dr. Alphonzo Smith says: "Did you ever 
think of Kant's great saying as an undesigned 
tribute to Genesis? Two things,' he said at the 
close of his Critique of Practical Reason, 'fill the 
mind with ever increasing admiration and awe the 
oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them : 
the starry heavens above and the moral law within/ 
These were Kant's two admirations, his two rever- 
ences, his two infinities, as they are of every man 
who thinks resolutely about them. 'Necessity is the 
law of the first,' said Kant, 'and liberty of the 
second. Is it not remarkable that the first book in 
the Bible faces precisely the two mysteries that 
moved the awe of the philosopher, Creation and 
Probation? The last word of human philosophy is 
thus the first word of the Bible. The twin sum- 
mits that have challenged the climbers of all 
ages are the starting places of Genesis. But there 
is a difference. To the modern philosopher there 
were mists upon the summits; to the author of Gen- 
esis there was sunlight. Two infinities, but one 
faith. The synthesis is in the first words of Gen- 
esis : In the beginning God.' " * 

But we have not exhausted the points of corre- 
spondence between Genesis and modern science. 
1 Keynote Studies, etc., p. 59. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 95 

"Evolution," says Simpson, the eminent biologist 
in Edinburgh, "is change with continuity of content. 
This we know to be the case in every instance of 
individual development. Bird and beast, fish and 
creeping thing, and man himself, all begin life in a. 
single cell-commence where the Protozoa left off — 
and so pass through many different stages into the 
adult organism of their kind. In this instance the 
terms of the series obviously have genetic connec- 
tion. If Evolution implies continuity, it is inconsist- 
ent with the idea of 'breaks' in the succession. A 
clear understanding at this point would mean the 
solution of half of our difficulties. " Dr. Simpson 
denies that there have been any "breaks" in the con- 
tinuity of nature: "Evolution is continuous change; 
it is continuity, and God has been immanent from 
the beginning. In the process there is a great deal 
that is little understood, and much that is unknown, 
but the days are past when the unknown, the gap in 
our knowledge, is emphasised as the sure abode of 
the divine." 1 One need hardly fear to follow such 
a devout believer in his Spiritual interpretation of 
Nature; but we must hold even Dr. Simpson 
strictly to the scientific lines, and when he says 
"there are no gaps" in the continuity of nature, he 
is on speculative and not scientific ground. He as- 
sumes that these "gaps" will be filled, and he may 
be right. But at the present, as I shall show you 

1 The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, p. 130. 



96 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

from the testimony of the scientists themselves, they 
are not yet explained. 

There are myriads of "missing links" in the end- 
less chain; but there are three great outstanding 
"breaks" in the scientific continuity of nature : the 
origin of matter; the origin of life; and the origin 
of mind. Science cannot explain the origin of mat- 
ter. Tyndall said that science has nothing to do 
with the question of origins, and that they belong 
to the domain of metaphysics. No matter where 
they belong, we have to deal with them in any at- 
tempt at a rational explanation of the world; and 
scientists have not escaped from the obligation to 
give some answer to them. Some, like the atheist, 
Haeckel, say that matter is eternal ; others like Max- 
well, held that the fact that matter presents "the 
essential characteristics at once of a manufactured 
article and a subordinate agent, precludes the idea 
of its being eternal and self-existent. It must have 
been created." But in any case, it is all speculation. 
The fact is that science cannot explain the origin 
of matter. 

Science cannot explain the origin of life. It can 
trace it to a primal physical basis in "protoplasm," 
and locate it in a microscopic "cell," which lies em- 
bedded in the protoplasm "like a bright globular 
spot." But how it starts no scientist knows. After 
all their efforts to produce life from non-living, or 
dead matter, it is still true that life only comes from 
life. Some scientists claim that "with the use of a 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 97 

platinum needle and electricity," they "have been 
able to cause the development of unfertilized eggs of 
the frog." And one suggests that the time may 
come when there may be offspring without paternity. 
But all of this is fantastic speculation. Haeckel 
suggested that the germs of life may have reached 
the earth from some other planet on a meteor. That 
does not explain the origin of life. It only trans- 
fers the mystery to some other world, and shows 
that some scientists have vivid and audacious imag- 
inations. The scientific fact is that science cannot 
explain the origin of life. 

Science cannot explain the origin of mind. Scien- 
tific research on this subject has been exhausted. 
Some of the greatest scientists have concentrated 
their highest powers on the question and have not 
solved it. Darwin believed that mind in animals 
and men was the same, differing only in degree ; but 
he was too much of a logician to think that this iden- 
tity explained the origin of mind. He said: "In 
what manner the mental powers were first devel- 
oped in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an in- 
quiry as how life itself first originated." * Mr. 
Romanes, one of the highest authorities, said : "I am 
as far as any one can be from throwing light upon 
the intrinsic nature of the probable origin of that 
which I am endeavouring to trace" — namely, self- 
consciousness. 2 Drummond quotes Huxley as say- 

1 Descent of Man, p. 66. 

2 Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 194-5. 



98 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

ing, in the name of Biology: "I know nothing, and 
I never hope to know anything, of the steps by 
which the passage from molecular movement to 
states of consciousness is effected." Drummond also 
quotes the famous German physiologist, Du Bois- 
Reymond, as saying : "It is all through and forever 
inconceivable that a number of atoms of Carbon, 
Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and so on, shall be 
other than indifferent as to how they are disposed, 
and how they move, how they were disposed and 
how they were moved, how they will be disposed 
and how they will be moved. It is utterly incon- 
ceivable how consciousness shall arise from their 
joint action." * And Drummond himself says : "At 
the present moment the ultimate origin of mind is 
as inscrutable a mystery as the origin of life." 

Darwin, Romanes, Huxley, Du Bois-Reymond, 
Drummond, and many more, refute Dr. Simpson's 
statement that there are no "breaks" in the contin- 
uity of nature. It is immaterial to our discussion 
what science may do hereafter in mending these 
"breaks"; what I am trying to show you is that 
Genesis agrees with science up to date. What has 
Genesis to say about these "breaks"? Does it cor- 
respond with modern science here ? 

There are three "breaks" in nature in the first 
chapter of Genesis, and what is most remarkable, 
they occur in precisely the places where they are 

1 The Ascent of Man, p. 125. 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 99 

found in the scheme of scientific Evolution — the 
origin of matter, the origin of life, and the origin 
of mind. Dr. Simpson says the old theology filled 
these gaps with the Deity, and he is right. And 
it is far better to find God in these abysms than to 
leave them only a vast emptiness, or a cloudland 
of speculation. In his account of creation, Moses 
makes a remarkable use of the Hebrew word bar a. 
The etymological root of this word is "to cut" ; but 
according to eminent Hebrew scholars, 1 if a writer 
wished to use a word to express the idea of creation 
as the bringing of something new into existence, 
he would use the word bara. Moses uses this word 
bara three times, evidently with intention and spe- 
cial discrimination, and in the sense of an absolute 
creation, and he uses it in precisely the places where 
science fails to explain nature, the origin of matter, 
the origin of life, and the origin of mind. 

The first "break" in Evolution is between cause 
and effect, or the origin of matter. Science is un- 
able to explain it, and simply says : "Agnosco" — I 
don't know. But Moses says : "In the beginning 
God bara — created — the heaven and the earth," 
brought into existence the material out of which 
the universe is built. That links up creation with 
an adequate First Cause, and gives you a rational 
starting point. There is no conflict between Gen- 
esis and our "modern scientific conceptions" here. 
Both say there is a gap, but Moses closes it. 

1 The Theistic Conception of the World, p. 57. 



ioo MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

The next "break" in the chain is in regard to the 
origin of life. Science skips it, flies across in an 
airplane of speculation, and leaves it gaping wide, 
a grand canyon in the realm of our knowledge of 
nature. But Moses closes it: "And God bara — 
created — great marine animals," or as our version 
puts it, "great whales." Moses was writing with a 
religious purpose, and his object was to assert that 
the huge monsters of the ocean were not objects 
for worship, as the heathen believed ; but were crea- 
tures of God. The point of correspondence with 
science here is that he places the origin of animal 
life in the order of fishes, and he puts fishes before 
birds. This is exactly the teaching of science. Ac- 
cording to science, animal life, life as a principle 
involving sensation, feeling, perception, memory, 
locomotion, and self-direction; life as an individ- 
ualised and indivisible centre of force; life as dis- 
tinguished from bioplasmic or vegetable life — this 
sort of life began with the order of fishes. It was 
a new thing in nature, and could not be evolved out 
of anything already made. Moses says God created 
it. There is no conflict between Genesis and modern 
science here. Both say there is a gap, but Moses 
closes it. 

The third "break" in Evolution is in regard to the 
origin of mind. Again the scientist exclaims, "Ag- 
nosco" — I don't know ; again Moses uses that word 
bara — "so God bara — created — man in his own 
image." Man's spirit was not evolved out of the 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 101 

dust, but inbreathed by the Almighty, and man be- 
came, in pre-eminent distinction above all the rest of 
the creation, a "living soul." Man stands alone in 
the possession of the regal and superior powers of a 
rational nature. No animal exhibits the kind of 
mentality we call reason — the power to hold self as 
an object of reflective thought, or self-conscious- 
ness; the sublime attribute of a will, which is more 
than simple self-direction, and involves the synthesis 
of reason and power in conscious moral freedom; 
the faculty of religion, or sense of responsibility to 
God, with all the implications of a spiritual life; 
and above all, the capacity of boundless progress. 
Animal intelligence often excels our own; but it is 
static, and remains always the same. The beaver 
builds its dam, the bee its cell, the eagle its nest, 
the spider its web to-day just as they did a thousand 
years ago; but man has "sought out many inven- 
tions" and is continually enlarging his knowledge 
and improving his condition. There is no conflict 
here between Genesis and modern science. Both 
say there is a measureless gap between man and the 
animals, but Moses closes it. 

Again we ask, how did Moses know just where 
the breaks in the Evolution series of modern science 
would occur? How did he know at what places in 
his narrative to use a word that means to bring 
something into existence whose origin science is 
unable to explain? In view of all these considera- 
tions, I think we are fully justified in the conclusion 



102 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

that they are mistaken who say that Genesis con- 
flicts with our modern scientific conceptions. There 
is a profound and wonderful harmony between 
Genesis and modern science. The answers which 
Genesis gives to questions about the origin of things 
are not "naive simplicity," but astonishing forecasts 
and intimations of coming discoveries of science. 
The sacred writer was not thinking of science, and 
knew nothing of it in our modern sense. He was 
writing with a specific religious purpose; but the 
Holy Spirit guided him to unconsciously sketch an 
outline of creation which would be true to modern 
scientific conceptions. Such great scientists as Sir 
Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, 
Agassiz, Dana, Winchell, Henry Drummond, Fran- 
cis H. Smith, and a host besides, have found no 
conflict between Genesis and modern science that 
disturbed their faith in the sacred narrative as a 
divine revelation. The first chapter of Genesis is 
unapproached in the literature of the world in the 
grandeur of its subject and the sublimity of its 
treatment. It should fill the soul with awe to find 
such evidence of divine inspiration in the very open- 
ing of the Holy Scriptures. Well may we enter this 
temple of knowledge with uncovered heads and 
reverent minds, for these precincts are holy. 

Let us mount the chariot of thought, and in 
imagination, transport ourselves swifter than the 
lightning's flash, back into the distant past, back 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 103 

beyond the birth of time, and watch the creation- of 
the world. By hypothesis, naught exists except God 
and ourselves. No star twinkles in the darkness. 
No life throbs in the vast vacuity. No sound breaks 
the silent stillness that reigns over the realms of 
primeval emptiness. The mighty drama begins with 
the background of eternity, from whose unfathom- 
able mystery Almighty God emerges to create the 
heavens and the earth. The pageant of creation is 
introduced by the august prelude : "In the beginning 
God!" Suddenly we become conscious that action 
has begun, and gigantic cycles of creative energy 
are rolling onward in magnificent sequence and 
in rhythmic order. The everlasting silence is broken 
by the fiat, "Let light be," and instantly the impal- 
pable ether flashes into being, quivering like a lumi- 
nous mist through the boundless void. Primal and 
immutable laws begin to work in the mighty womb 
of nature. Elemental forces begin to stir in the 
abysmal depths. Under the influence of gravity 
countless centres of attraction arise in the luminous 
mist, and around them gather the glowing materials 
of future systems of suns and planets. As the date- 
less eons wear away, gigantic nebulae roll asunder, 
and whirling into shining globes of glowing and 
condensing matter, swing into orbits, and go spin- 
ning away across the fields of space, sowing im- 
mensity with starry worlds. One of these nebulae 
becomes our solar system, and a huge mass of in- 
candescent matter detaches itself to become our 



104 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

earth, for ages succeeding ages a formless globe 
whirling on its axis, but agitated and heaving with 
the brooding activities of the Spirit of God. 

As we watch it, we see mysterious molecular 
forces beginning to work, "homogeneous and un- 
stable, but tending to differentiation and variety; 
splitting into opposites, standing off in polarities, 
ramifying into attractions and repulsions, light, heat, 
magnetism, and electricity/' and endless chemical 
combinations and reactions. An atmosphere begins 
to form, and the heated globe condenses the envelop- 
ing vapours that fall in torrential rain, and rise in 
mighty clouds of steam. A vast separation divides 
the firmament above from the solidifying earth be- 
neath. Mighty cosmic changes, in stately order, 
prepare the earth for man, as creation unrolls the 
splendid drama of nature onward to its predestined 
end. The curtain is lifted, and the sun and moon, 
and stars appear, moving in dazzling glory across 
the sky. Time is born, and begins its record in the 
rhythmic alternations of day and night. Vast con- 
tinents emerge from the heaving seas, and sink be- 
neath them, then rise again to form the solid land ; 
here bulging into lofty mountain ranges, there 
spreading out in immense plains and valleys, dotted 
with gleaming lakes and seamed with shining rivers, 
waving with primeval forests and carpeted with 
luxuriant grass. Life appears, first as a simple or- 
ganising centre of force in protoplasm, giving rise 
to the lowest vegetable plant, then rising to the 



GENESIS IN THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE 105 

highest forms of the vegetable kingdom, and stor- 
ing up the coal and oil and gas in the depths of 
the earth for the use of future ages. Animal life 
appears, first in the mollusc, or oyster, a mere lump 
of vitalised marine pulp, but rising rapidly through 
countless intermediate forms of endless variety of 
fishes and reptiles to the huge leviathans that swim 
in the steaming waters, the mighty birds of the air, 
and the gigantic animals that tread the solid land. 
All seems complete. The mighty stage is set. All 
the splendid scenery is arranged, the lofty firmament 
glitters with stars and flames with suns ; the heaving 
seas teem with life; the verdant earth is astir with 
living creatures. All nature smiles with benevolent 
design, and the appointed seasons roll in beautiful 
succession, and God pronounces it "Good" ! 

But is it finished? To what end was it made? 
Is there a creature yet made who can understand 
it? It shows intelligence, and benevolence and power 
in every detail, but what is the rational end of it all? 
How useless the gold and the silver and the coal 
and the iron, and the copper, and all the myriad 
materials stored in the secret places of the earth, if 
this is all! But listen. There comes forth from 
the invisible abode of the Godhead the solemn an- 
nouncement : "Let us make man in our image, after 
our likeness!" 

"So God created man in his own image, in the 
image of God created he him; male and female 
created he them. And God blessed them, and God 



io6 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and re- 
plenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion 
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the 
air, and over every living thing that moveth upon 
the earth." This was the finishing work of the 
Infinite Artist, the benediction of Almighty God 
upon his glorious work! 



Ill 

THE HEBREW PROPHETS 



Ill 

THE HEBREW PROPHETS 

IF we take Moses as the first, and Malachi as 
the last, of the Hebrew prophets, we have a 
period roughly speaking of a thousand years, 
during which this remarkable order of men lived 
in the world. As we look back now, and see these 
men in their true perspective, they resemble a dis- 
tant range of mountains stretching across the plains 
of history. They are lifted high above the level of 
the humanity around them, and stand in bold outline 
against the background of antiquity. The sky-line 
of this range of human mountains is broken by lofty 
peaks, like Moses, and Samuel, and Isaiah, and 
Ezekiel, and Amos. Here and there long stretches 
of mist conceal the course of history, but when the 
range emerges into view, we see that it is the same 
system, and ever growing clearer and more distinct. 
The sunlight of truth rests on all this range of 
human mountains and plays like a coronal of glory 
around these summits; and one, Elijah, is a smoking 
cone crowned with fire, and visible across thirty 
centuries ! If we climb these shining summits, study 
their massive strength, their grandeur, and their 
solemn significance in the history of man, and look 

109 



no MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

out from their heights on the far-sweeping destinies 
of the race, something of their strength and splen- 
dour steals into our hearts ; and as our faith is "built 
upon" them, we realise the solidity of its founda- 
tions and the massive grandeur of its truth. 

Whatever of truth we hold to-day, we hold be- 
cause these men lived, and suffered, and spoke with 
living voices to their times. All the rest of man- 
kind were groping in darkness, "feeling after God, 
if haply they might find him," but bowing down to 
idols, and worshipping the work of their own hands. 
These Hebrew prophets alone had the knowledge of 
the true God, and the splendid moral idealism that 
is its natural fruit; and as the ages rolled on they 
unfolded with ever-increasing clearness God's truth 
to man. They were unswervingly loyal to their con- 
victions. Nothing could obscure their vision or 
shake them from the fundamentals of their faith. 
Their ministry makes the whole history of Israel 
luminous with spiritual meaning and beauty, and 
Christianity is only the unfolding of the inner sig- 
nificance of their message. As we look back and 
see them in their true historic perspective, we must 
realize our immense indebtedness to them ; for their 
heroic fidelity to their high calling preserved the 
sacred gift of truth from destruction, and prepared 
the world for the coming of the Lord of life. 

First: The Hebrew prophets were especially in- 
spired by the Holy Ghost to reveal divine truth to 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS in 

man. They were "sent" by God to teach his people, 
and were endued with the Holy Ghost for their mis- 
sion. God "spake in time past unto the fathers 
by the prophets." They were "holy men of God, 
and spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." 
They were "the holy prophets," of whom "the world 
was not worthy." While their utterances were 
called forth by specific occasions, and were ad- 
dressed to specific conditions, they had a double 
significance, and were the revelations of a system 
of supernatural knowledge. They were conscious 
of this fact, though they imperfectly understood its 
meaning. This was the "hidden wisdom" of which 
St. Paul speaks, the primal purpose of God in 
Christ, which was formed before the world began, 
and was gradually made known to man. The 
prophets were intense students of this deep truth, 
of which they caught only intermittent and transient 
glimpses, and "searched diligently" to understand it. 
The prophets were not random and ranting talk- 
ers like the heathen prophets around them ; but intel- 
ligent interpreters of the divine will, and spoke 
with the conscious authority of their high vocation. 
There is deep significance in the repeated statement 
that they were "holy" men, holy not in the sense 
alone that they were separated to their exalted office 
by a special consecration; but in the deeper sense 
that they were men who had a profound spiritual 
experience. They walked and talked with God, and 
he admitted them to the secrets of his truth and love. 



ii2 MODERN THEORY, OF THE BIBLE 

He put his Holy Spirit upon them, and declared 
them sacrosanct, saying "do my prophets no harm." 
The indwelling energy of the spirit of Christ stirred 
them to lofty utterance. Their litanies 

" Came 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, 
The canticles of love and woe." 

This is not the doctrine of the prophets set forth 
by the Higher Critics. They have stripped the 
prophets of Israel of their mantles of flame, and 
they come before us almost in the garb of mendi- 
cants. A recent writer says that from Moses to 
Samuel the prophets of Israel were "little more than 
roving dervishes," and that during that period "the 
will of God was supposed to be learned from wiz- 
ards, sorcerers, necromancers, soothsayers, by lot, 
by the whisper of trees, the flight of birds, the pass- 
ing of clouds, as well as other signs, omens, etc." 1 
This is true of the heathen, but if there is any- 
thing certain in Old Testament history it is that 
God took special and emphatic pains to protect Israel 
against such superstition "To the law and to the 
testimony," — let that decide. Here is the "law"t: 
"Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither 
seek after wizards, to be defiled by them : I am the 
Lord your God." (Lev. xix, 31.) "The soul that 
turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and 

1 The Old Testament in the Life of To-day, by J. A. Rice, 
D.D., p. 33. 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 113 

after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will 
even set my face against that soul, and will cut 
him off from among his people." (Lev. xx, 6.) 
"When thou art come into the land which the Lord 
thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do 
after the abominations of those nations. There 
shall not be found among you any one . . . that 
useth divination, or an observer of times, or an en- 
chanter, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar 
spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that 
do these things are an abomination unto the Lord." 
(Deut. xviii, 10- 11.) 

The Higher Critics get rid of all this, so far as it 
is applicable to the earlier history of Israel, by 
their theory of the late origin of the Levitical law. 
They say that Moses did not write Deuteronomy; 
but Deuteronomy says he did : "These be the words 
which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side of 
Jordan." (Deut. i, 1.) If Moses did not write or 
dictate Deuteronomy, that is a deliberate lie. It is 
not a falsehood. A man may tell a falsehood be- 
lieving it to be the truth; but a lie is a statement 
known to be false told with the intention to deceive. 
Whoever wrote that knew that it was either true or 
false. If he knew it was false, he deliberately de- 
ceived us; and if he knew it to be true, then it 
establishes the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy, 
and gives validity to his law. 

Moses began his administration with a grand 
demonstration of the eternal difference between the 



H4 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

black arts of the heathen and the miracles of Jeho- 
vah. Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, and 
confused Pharaoh with their wonderful magic; but 
they at last admitted, "This is the finger of God," 
and gave up the contest. So Israel started out of 
Egypt with the truth wrought into their experience 
by a series of stupendous miracles that wizards, 
sorcerers, necromancers, soothsayers, witches, and 
magicians, were impostors, and their occult arts 
were agencies of the Devil. The people did consult 
them, but they did it in flagrant violation of Divine 
law ; and Isaiah attributed the alienation of Jehovah 
from his chosen people to the fact that they were 
"replenished from the east, and were soothsayers 
like the Philistines." No true prophet supposed the 
will of God was learned from wizards and sooth- 
sayers. He knew better. 

And who were the dervishes, to whom they are 
likened by the Higher Critics? There were no 
dervishes in the time of the Hebrew prophets. 
They are religious orders among the Hindus and 
Mohammedans, and correspond roughly to the 
mendicant orders of the Roman Catholic Church. 
There were different classes among them, desig- 
nated as "dancing," "howling," "whirling" derv- 
ishes, according to the particular character of their 
exercises. Most of them were roving bands of beg- 
gars, many of them expert swindlers, and all of 
them religious fanatics, whose acts of so-called 
worship consisted in violent physical contortions 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 115 

without rational meaning. These are the pitiful 
caricatures to whom the Higher Critics liken the 
earlier prophets of Israel! As the gradual growth 
of prophecy from a vague primitive groping after 
the truth is a fundamental principle of the Higher 
Criticism, it follows that the earlier the prophet, 
the less he knew and the more primitive his con- 
ceptions and the cruder his worship. This would, 
of course, make Moses a dervish. As the lofty ut- 
terances of Moses, and his whole profound ritual, 
embodying in its mystic symbolism the mighty truths 
of redemption that were to come to their full bloom 
in Christ, could not be reconciled with such a prim- 
itive stage of religion, the Higher Critics invented 
the theory that Moses did not write the Pentateuch 
to get out of the difficulty! 

But their whole theory contradicts the testimony 
of both the Old and New Testaments, as well as the 
common sense view of the matter. There was "de- 
velopment" in Hebrew prophecy; but you cannot 
have "development" without something to "de- 
velop"; and the development of prophecy was the 
gradual and progressive unfolding in the conscious- 
ness of Israel's prophets of the primal truth given 
to Adam, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham in 
the beginning. Hebrew prophecy was never con- 
founded with the irrational ravings of the heathen 
prophets. The Higher Critics say that "Saul raved 
among the prophets." My Bible doesn't say so. It 
says that "he prophesied among the prophets." But 



n6 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

the Hebrew word means "to rave" — speak inco- 
herently and with excitement bordering on madness. 
Suppose it does, did not the translators of our Eng- 
lish Bible know that as well as the modern scholar? 
After studying the word in all its meanings, they 
decided to translate it by the English word "prophe- 
sied." They were not obliged to make their phil- 
ology fit into the theory that Israel was a tribe of 
Bedouin Arabs and the prophets little more than 
roving dervishes! 

As an illustration of the brilliant logic of the 
Higher Critics, and a sample of modern thought 
versus traditional faith, take the explanation they 
give of Elisha at his meeting with Jehoshaphat and 
Jehoram. Jehoshaphat had asked Elisha's counsel 
about going to battle with the three kings of Moab. 
The Higher Critic says that the "dervishes played 
upon musical instruments" ; so when Elisha asked 
for a minstrel, they sent him a dervish, "during 
whose performance, 'the hand of the Lord came 
upon him.' " The "performance" of the dervish 
wrought on Elisha's emotions and in some way 
gave him prophetic intuition. According to that 
logic some of the greatest modern preachers were 
little more than dervishes! I have heard Bishop 
Marvin, not call for a minstrel, but perform the 
part of one himself, and sing, 

" O, come angel band, 
Come, and around me stand! 
O bear me away on your snowy wings 
To my eternal home ! " 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 117 

and the hand of the Lord not only came upon him, 
but upon all who heard him, until many of them got 
excited and as happy as Saul that time he "raved" 
and shouted among the prophets ! According to the 
Higher Critic's logic, because sacred music stirred 
the soul of Bishop Marvin, and lifted him to almost 
seraphic heights, he was little more than a "roving 
dervish," whose howlings and whirlings and danc- 
ings and incoherent mouthings were supposed to be 
religious exercises. 

I have heard the great evangelist, D. L. Moody, 
just before preaching, call for the "minstrel," San- 
key, to sing, 

" There were ninety and nine that safely lay 
In the shelter of the fold; 
But one was out on the hills away, 
Far off from the gates of gold," 

to put his soul in tune for the message on the 
"Prodigal Son," and under the hand of the Lord 
that came upon him, give that message with tremen- 
dous earnestness; and at the close of the message, 
the "minstrel" sang again, 

"Almost persuaded now to believe," 

and the hand of the Lord came on hundreds who 
accepted Christ. According to the logic of the 
Higher Critic, Moody was little more than a rov- 
ing dervish because he used music to stir the soul. 
It is no proof that Elisha was little more than a 
roving dervish because he called for music to put 



u8 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

him in tune with God. It was in accordance with 
the psychology of all religious experience. The 
use of music in religious worship to excite the emo- 
tions is a perfectly normal use of the means of 
grace, and St. Paul commended it to the Ephesians : 
"Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your 
hearts to the Lord." Nothing prepares me so well 
for preaching, and I speak from an experience of 
more than fifty years, than to spend the hour be- 
fore going to the pulpit in prayer and in singing 
some of the great hymns of the Church. I will 
have nothing to do with a theory of the Old Testa- 
ment, which in the name of technical scholarship, 
and on the basis of a microscopic philological analy- 
sis, plays such havoc with all the laws of psychology, 
and degrades the prophets of the living God to the 
roving dervishes. I don't wonder that this theory 
makes infidels of modern Bible readers. If I be- 
lieved the modern theory of the prophets, I would 
not waste my time studying them. 

But approaching them from the standpoint of 
the traditional belief in the Bible, I find no trace 
of heathen frenzy in Hebrew prophecy; nothing that 
corresponds to the clairvoyant mental states of 
Hindu sages, or transcendental moods of Moham- 
medan ecstasy, or rhapsody of Norseman bard, or 
psychic states of pagan magic. The heathen had 
their prophets, and the Hebrew prophets were in 
perpetual and tremendous conflict with them. The 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 119 

whole difference between the prophets of Israel 
and the prophets of the heathen was magnificently 
illustrated by the case of Elijah on Carmel. The 
prophets of Baal wrought themselves up to a state 
of excitement verging on madness; they danced 
and howled around their altar, and leaped in fran- 
tic violence about their sacrifice, and cut themselves 
with knives until their blood flowed, while Elijah 
mocked them, and poured upon them the ridicule 
and lofty scorn of his faith. And when their orgy 
ended, Elijah, the prophet of Jehovah, stood erect, 
and calm, and rational, and prayed a simple prayer 
to the living God, and the answering fire fell ! This 
contrast between the wild frenzy of the heathen 
prophets, and the calm and rational and dignified 
conduct of the Hebrew prophet was typical of the 
fundamental difference between the religion of 
Israel and that of the heathen. According to the 
Higher Critics, Elijah was a roving dervish, a 
shaggy, long-bearded Bedouin from beyond Jor- 
dan, who straggled into Samaria, and got involved 
in controversy with the prophets of Baal, — that is, 
if there ever was such a person, which is doubtful 
on their theory. According to the traditional view 
of the Bible, he was a man sent from God at a 
solemn crisis of Israel's history, and clothed with 
the power of his Spirit to vindicate the cause of 
truth. 

No, no, no! The prophets of Israel were not 
dervishes, but men who were filled with the Spirit 



120 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

of the living God. You cannot explain their pecu- 
liar illumination by any principles of psychology, 
far less resolve them into natural phenomena of 
neurology, epileptic spasms, auto-intoxications, and 
mental over-tensions of medical materialism. You 
cannot class the Hebrew prophets with cunning 
necromancers, artful manipulators of psychic forces 
and contemptible jugglers with ouija boards; or 
confound them with the metaphysical visionaries 
who babble a fluent nonsense about a "cosmic con- 
sciousness" and the "evolution of humanity"; and 
it is an insult to God to class his prophets with 
howling beggars, hooded sorcerers, long-haired voo- 
doos, fortune-tellers and fakirs who made mer- 
chandise of superstition. You cannot put the 
prophets of Israel even among the poets, who glimps- 
ing the inner harmony of the world in moments of 
rare mental exaltation, regale us with their musical 
idealism! They are far above all human cults. 

The "visions," and "woes," and "burdens," and 
theophanies, and predictions of the prophets were 
logical deductions from their system of truth and 
harmonised perfectly with the premises of their 
faith. Their inspiration was not that of the Delphic 
tripod, nor did they learn the will of God from the 
flight of birds or the whisper of the wind in the 
trees. Their creed was not an abstract philosophy, 
or the cold speculations of a rational dialectic. No 
natural psychic process could have lifted these men 
high enough for them to see what they saw in the 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 121 

distant future. They received their messages from 
the Holy Spirit, whose actuating energy on their 
minds communicated a supernatural knowledge, 
which had a hidden significance that made their 
hearts burn within them. They felt their whole 
nature quivering with the mystic meaning of their 
message. It was still, and would be for long ages, 
a "hidden wisdom," until the fulness of the time 
should come for it to be made known in Christ; 
but it held them like a mighty magnet, and gave 
unity, meaning, dignity and power to the whole 
history of. Israel. The uncomprehended attraction 
turned their faces to the future, and shading their 
eyes with their hands, they discerned the dim figure 
of the cross, the symbol of suffering and sacrifice, 
on the far-off horizon of the ages, in which all 
their knowledge seemed to centre, and out of which 
a river of salvation flowed, widening to the utter- 
most ends of the earth. "Of which salvation they 
enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied 
of the grace that should come. . . . Searching what, 
or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ which 
was in them, did signify, when it testified before- 
hand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that 
should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that 
not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister 
the things which are now reported unto you by 
them which have preached the gospel unto you with 
the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which 
things the angels desire to look into." You never 



122 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

can harmonise that exalted New Testament con- 
ception of Hebrew prophecy with the theory of the 
Higher Critics that the prophets were little more 
than heathen dervishes. 

Second: The Hebrew prophets were called of 
God by a special vocation, and carried divine ere- 
dentials of their office. It is important to emphasise 
this point, for the Higher Critics as we have seen, 
place the Hebrew prophets with the prophets of the 
heathen. They say that prophecy was "probably 
taken over from the Canaanites." 1 But in the 
Bible they appear as a distinct class, and they were 
called by the definite personal summons of God to 
their work. "And the Lord God of their fathers 
sent to them by his messengers, rising up betimes, 
(i. e., continually and carefully), and sending; be- 
cause he had compassion on his people, and on his 
dwelling place." (II Chron. xxxvi, 15.) "See I 
have this day set thee over the nations and over the 
kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, to throw 
down, to build and to plant." (Jer. i, 10.) "And 
he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the 
house of Israel, and speak with my words unto 
them." (Ezek. iii, 4.) "The Lord took me as I 
followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go 
prophesy unto my people Israel." (Amos, vii, 15.) 
God sent them. They spoke with authority. 

God called Moses by the Burning Bush ; and Sam- 

1 The Old Testament in the Life of To-day, p. 3$. 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 123 

uel by the voice in his bed-chamber; and Elisha by 
the mantle of Elijah; and Isaiah by the vision in 
the temple; and Jeremiah by the secret whisper 
in his heart that was like fire in his bones; and 
Ezekiel by the mystic whirlwind on the banks of 
Chebar. As Jesus was "driven" by the Holy Spirit 
into the Wilderness after his baptism, so these men 
were "driven" by an inward compulsion to their 
work. It was the impact of God upon their souls. 
They were "God-intoxicated" men. Sometimes they 
were priests, like Jeremiah, and sometimes simple 
laymen like Amos. They belonged to no order, yet 
themselves form the highest order in the spiritual 
economy of Israel. Samuel seems to have organised 
them into a fraternity, or guild, called "The Sons 
of the Prophets," and they had a recognised official 
rank ; but they were tremendous individualities, free 
from all the restrictions of hereditary caste and the 
limitations of sacerdotal office, independent and un- 
trammeled preachers of truth. Yet they were united 
in a solidarity of thought and purpose and spirit 
that made them, in striking contrast with the degen- 
erate priesthood of Aaron, the real anchors of the 
national seriousness and leaders of the national 
progress. They were the representatives under the 
monarchy of the old and unchanged theocratic gov- 
ernment of Israel, a government in which God was 
the invisible king, who was immediately represented 
by his servants, the prophets. For this reason they 
stood above the kings. They were spiritual tribunes, 



124 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

with a veto on kings and princes, and were the 
guardians of the destiny of Israel. They were 
heroic defenders of the ancient faith, fearless ad- 
vocates of truth, stern denouncers of idolatry, cham- 
pions of the rights of man in the largest and truest 
sense, bulwarks of the divine order of the world, 
standing immovably firm for righteousness amid the 
universal corruption around them. They were the 
pioneers of a true democracy, equally removed on 
the one hand from the lop-sided individualism that 
unbalances community life, and on the other from 
the rigid socialism that destroys the individual. 

The grandest thing about the Hebrew prophets is 
not their sublime doctrines, or their sublimer altruis- 
tic spirit, but their intense spiritual earnestness. 
Theyi flung themselves into the conflict with evil 
with a flaming abandon. The very name by which 
they were known meant to boil, to spout, to gush, as 
though the energies of a moral volcano slumbered 
in their hearts, and leaped forth in the lightning of 
their speech. The fabled thunderbolts of Jove were 
playthings compared with the shafts of truth they 
hurled. Their words made kings tremble on their 
thrones and armies flee apace. Heaven was colon- 
ised in every heart among them; but it was not a 
heaven of ethereal ease and ecstatic repose, where the 
spirit lounged in ambrosial indolence and seraphic 
inaction; but a heaven of splendid strenuousness of 
moral endeavour to help Almighty God save a fallen 
x world, beat back the forces of evil, and redeem 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 125 

humanity: such a heaven as Jesus disclosed when 
he said, "My meat is to do the will of him that sent 
me and to finish his work." 

And they carried the flaming seals of the Holy 
Ghost on their commission. There are four canons 
of prophetic validity, the ethical, the dynamic, the 
doctrinal, and the predictive; and by all these tests 
the Hebrew prophets stand before the world amply 
accredited as the ambassadors of heaven. They 
were "holy men," honest and clean in their char- 
acter, and utterly unselfish in their motives, as wit- 
ness Elisha's refusal of the gifts of Naaman. Their 
message was attested by the power of the Holy 
Ghost, sometimes immediately, as when the fire fell 
on Carmel, and always in the end. All their utter- 
ances not only harmonised with fundamental truth, 
but unfolded and enforced it. All their predictions 
came true to the letter. By these tests the true 
prophecy was discriminated from the false, which 
existed then, as it exists now, as a part of that 
"mystery of iniquity" that works destruction to 
man. The freshness of the morning is in all the 
thought of the Hebrew prophets. The beauty of 
holiness beams in all their messages. A bright halo 
of truth encircles them and the glory of the Lord 
shines round about them. Isaiah eloquently de- 
scribes them: "How beautiful upon the mountains 
are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that 
publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of joy, 



126 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

that publisheth salvation; that saith to Zion, Thy 
God reigneth!" 

The world has travelled far along the track of 
jtime, since the prophets of Israel grappled with the 
problems of their day; but after centuries of what 
we call progress and all the enlightenment of the 
ages, the profoundest analysis of the great mystery 
we call life can find no deeper, or surer foundations 
of thought on which to build the universe than 
the truth proclaimed by these Hebrew prophets, 
They saw clearly what many world-famous men 
never saw at all, or seeing would not acknowledge, 
that this is a rational universe, projected from the 
beginning on lines of ethical life; and they asserted 
with all the earnestness of their soul, that righteous- 
ness is the eternal and necessary basis of civilisa- 
tion, and the only foundation on which a stable 
human society can be built; a righteousness which 
consists in the free obedience of the conscience to 
the revealed will of God as the ultimate authority in 
morals. It is the lucid perception of the spiritual 
foundations of life, and the consistent, courageous, 
and inexorable demand for righteousness both in 
the individual and the nation, that invest the mes- 
sage of the Hebrew prophets with imperishable 
value and unapproaehed sublimity. 

Third: The Hebrew prophets were great ethical 
teachers. This perhaps is the most outstanding 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 127 

fact about them. While the truth they uttered had 
an ulterior significance of which they were only 
dimly conscious, the heart of that truth was right- 
eousness, expressed in their ancient law by the 
command, "Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your 
God am holy." (Lev. xix, 2.) The motto of their 
religion was "Holiness to the Lord." It was graven 
on the crown of pure gold which the High Priest 
wore, and was the fundamental truth wrought into 
the very texture of their faith. They put the em- 
phasis of their ministry on righteousness, which 
meant with them obedience to Almighty God. They 
were not theorisers, asking, "What is truth?" but 
announcers of truth clearly understood. Their the- 
ology was not a speculative doctrine, but a positive 
faith. Their religion was an applied morality, and 
their morality was a consciousness of God. Their 
knowledge of God gave them a key to the problems 
of their times, and they never lost their bearings 
amid the storms that raged about them. They 
struggled like spiritual Titans to swing the world 
into harmony with the plans of God. 

It is interesting to note the attitude of the prophets 
to the ritual worship of Israel. There are two 
theories of the origin of the Levitical system. One 
is the traditional theory which I believe. According 
to that theory, when Moses led Israel out of Egypt, 
by the direction of God, and under the inspiration 
of his Holy Spirit, he gave them an elaborate relig- 
ious ritual. There was a priesthood, and a service 



128 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

that included altars and ceremonies, and sacrifices, 
and numberless details of worship. All of these 
were symbolical and significant of the profound 
truths of Israel's religion; and the very core of the 
system was a foreshadowing of the great vicarious 
sacrifice of the Cross. This ritual, while external, 
and making little appeal to spiritual thought, was ad- 
mirably adapted to educate a crude and undeveloped 
people in the fundamental truths of their religion. 
The laws that Moses gave to Israel were a part of 
that system and inextricably interwoven with it. 
But the same thing happened then that happens now, 
and that always will happen, the forms of religion 
became a substitute for religion. The ethical ele- 
ment of the system dropped out, and it became a 
mere shell, empty of all moral power. Perverted 
from its original design, instead of being a help, it 
became a hindrance to spiritual progress, and the 
prophets denounced it with unsparing severity. 

The modern theory is that the Levitical system 
was invented by the priests after the Jews returned 
from Babylon, and attached to the name of Moses 
to give it an air of antiquity. It was subsequent to 
the prophets and foreign to their spirit. This is 
not the place to discuss the question of the author- 
ship of the Pentateuch— or "Hexateuch," as the 
Higher Criticism calls the first six books of the 
Bible; but several questions rise at the threshold. 
First, who were these priests, and where did they 
get the authority to construct such a system ? There 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 129 

is a rational explanation of their origin on the old 
theory ; but on this new theory they are like Melchi- 
zedek, "without father or mother''! Second, as 
Isaiah and Amos lived several centuries before the 
time when these unknown priests got up their 
"codes," how could they denounce this system of 
ritual worship? It is easy to understand how, ac- 
cording to the old theory, the prophets could de- 
nounce a formalism which had become a hypocritical 
substitute for the spiritual reality; but it is impos- 
sible to understand how, according to the modern 
theory of its origin, they could condemn a thing 
which did not come into existence until they were 
all in their graves. The Higher Critics must get up 
something better than that before I can accept it, 
no matter what academic credentials it brings ! 

No, this ritual was no late invention of unknown 
priests. It was as old as Moses, and had been in 
use for hundreds of years; but it had become a 
barren formalism, an effete system, a mere hollow 
shell. 

People trusted in it when their hearts were far 
from God. Nothing could be more offensive to 
true faith than the hypocrisy it cloaked. The re- 
ligion of the prophets was a spiritual experience 
born of a close communion with God. To an Isaiah, 
an Amos, a Micah, the external office amounted to 
nothing unless the inner ethical life corresponded 
with its pretensions ; and smoking altars, and bleed- 
ing lambs, and mouthing priests, and braying trum- 



130 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

pets, and clanging cymbals, and swaying censers, 
were the meaningless ceremonialism that was the 
veriest mockery of true religion. Isaiah denounced 
it with scathing severity, and said God hated the 
whole system of feasts and sacrifices; and turning 
from this dead formalism, he made his appeal for a 
religion of practical righteousness : "Cease to do 
evil; learn to do right." Amos exclaimed with in- 
dignant earnestness, blazing with holy wrath, mak- 
ing Amaziah so mad that he ordered him out of the 
king's chapel and told him to leave the country: 
"I hate, I despise your feast days. I will not ap- 
pear in your solemn assemblies. Take away from 
me the noise of your songs, for I will not listen to 
the melody of your viols; but let judgment run 
down like waters and righteousness like a mighty 
stream." 

And Micah, milder in manner, but no less positive 
in spirit, asks : "Will the Lord be pleased with thou- 
sands of rams, or with ten thousand rivers of oil? 
He hath showed thee, O man, what is good. And 
what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do 
justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
God?" No wonder Amaziah set the police on 
Amos, for his doctrine cut the grit from under 
his whole job. One can easily imagine how the 
priests, robed in the dazzling vestments of their 
office, performing their spectacular rites, and in- 
toning their mechanical ritual before the altars in 
Jerusalem, frowned on the daring and sensational 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 131 

young prophet, Isaiah, as he thundered in the ears 
of the people Jehovah's repudiation of their mock- 
ery of his worship ! The priests threw Jeremiah 
into the dungeon, and tried him for his life. But 
whether it was the gross and immoral idolatry of 
Baal, the obscene orgies of Astarte, the cruel rites 
of Moloch, or the dead formality of Israel that 
blocked their way, the prophets smote it with the 
lightning of their wrath and asserted the eternal 
principles of truth. 

Fourth: The Hebrew prophets were men of lofty 
moral courage. Theirs was no easy task. They 
faced "a frowning world." The very genius of 
their religion made compromise impossible. Some- 
times they stood, like Elijah, apparently alone, and 
fought single-handed with the powers of darkness. 
Sometimes their whole nature shrank from the 
ordeal, and they would willingly have avoided it, 
as in the case of Moses, whose stubborn reluctance 
to accept his task had to be overcome by divine 
insistence; or Jeremiah, who vowed he would preach 
no more, but whose resolution melted away under 
the intense conviction of duty that was like a fire 
shut up in his bones; or Jonah, who attempted to 
run away to the end of the world! But they had 
the courage of their convictions. The martyr spirit 
flamed in their hearts, and they rose to the crest of 
every crisis with sublime fearlessness. Braver men 
never lived than these heroic heralds of the king 



132 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

of heaven! They knew they were right and that 
in the end the right would win. They were for- 
ward-looking men. The light on their brow was 
the light of sunrise, not of sunset. 

We justly admire the splendid spirit of Ambrose, 
Bishop of Milan, when he brought the haughty- 
Roman emperor to his knees on the threshold of the 
Church, asserted the lofty authority of his spiritual 
office, and defied imperial power to swerve him 
from his post; and the fearless Becket in his un- 
yielding resistance to the imperious English king; 
and Luther standing by his convictions in the face 
of the hostile power of Christendom; and Wesley 
quelling the mob by the majestic calm of his pres- 
ence. But look at Moses and Aaron going boldly 
in to Pharaoh, and demanding the release of Israel; 
and Samuel rebuking the haughty king, Saul; and 
Elijah hurling in the teeth of Ahab the accusation 
of his crimes ; and Jeremiah sinking up to his arm- 
pits in the filth of his dungeon, but sternly uttering 
the truth that burned in his heart; and Amos de- 
nouncing the luxury and injustice of his times, and 
lashing the "kine of Bashan" — the women of the 
land — with a scourge of fire! 

Let the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tell 
us how he regarded these ancient heroes of Israel's 
faith. He is speaking specifically of the prophets: 
"who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought 
righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths 
of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 133 

edge of the sword, out of weakness were made 
strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the 
armies of the aliens. Women received their dead 
raised to life again; and others were tortured, not 
accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a bet- 
ter resurrection ; and others had trial of cruel mock- 
ings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and 
imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn 
asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; 
they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; 
being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the 
world was not worthy). They wandered in des- 
erts, and in mountains, and in dens, and in caves 
of the earth." Such is the inspired record of the 
prophets of Israel. 

Fifth: The Hebrew prophets were great orators. 
A distinguished man, who himself ranks among the 
highest as an American orator, has edited a collec- 
tion of books entitled The World's Famous Ora- 
tions. He has gathered together in these volumes 
the most noted speeches of Greek, Roman, English, 
Irish and American orators; but he left out the 
greatest of them all, the Hebrew orators. If oratory 
is the art of swaying men by public speech, and its 
merit is determined by its influence on the course 
of human affairs, then the orators of all other lands 
must yield in greatness to the prophets of Israel. 
In the importance of the truth they proclaimed ; in 
their profound knowledge of the basic principles 



134 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

of all government; in their clear insight into the 
constitution of human society; in lofty imagination, 
and that exalted passion that is the soul of all elo- 
quence; above all, in the high moral character and 
intense personality that give commending sanction 
to public speech, they are our masters still. 

Demosthenes cannot compare with Moses, nor 
Cicero with Isaiah, either in the greatness of their 
thought, or the fiery spirit with which they spoke, 
or the dramatic circumstances under which they 
delivered their messages, or the far-reaching results 
of their utterance. Burke must yield to Jeremiah 
as a political philosopher, and Amos far surpasses 
either Cobden or Bright as a champion of social 
justice. Wendell Phillips pleading for the abolition 
of slavery, and kindling the fires of war with the 
torch of his zeal, never rose to the high level of 
Ezekiel, who, though himself a captive, expounded 
the true principles of political freedom. Webster 
at his best is far below Paul on Mars Hill, according 
to his own definition of eloquence as consisting in 
the man, the subject, and the occasion. Irish elo- 
quence, blazing with fierce invective against British 
misrule, is inferior to Isaiah's lofty scorn of idolatry, 
or Elijah's sarcasm hurled at Baal's frenzied priests 
on Carmel. Listen to the bold, but dignified speech 
of Peter to the excited thousands in Jerusalem on 
the day of Pentecost, or the noble discourse of 
Stephen before the mob, or Paul at Athens or before 
Agrippa, and see the very highest type of oratory. 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 135 

Nor is it wrong to think of Jesus in his character 
of a public speaker, addressing vast multitudes of 
people, now in the crowded synagogue, now in the 
open air, on the hillside or by the seashore, and now 
in the great court of the temple ; astonishing all who 
heard him by the tone of authority with which he 
spoke, and so impressing the officers sent to arrest 
him that they left him unmolested, and gave as 
their reason for failing to perform the service on 
which they were sent, "Never man spake as this 
man" ! It is a significant fact, and should be con- 
clusive as to the comparative value of the method, 
that Jesus committed his message that was to save 
the world, not to written documents, but to oral 
speech, and made the tongue of fire, and not the 
pen, the emblem of its propagation. The truth is 
safer, and more powerful, lodged in the heart as a 
living experience out of which the mouth may 
speak, than it is when enshrined in the cold and 
lifeless mechanism of literary form. 

What an orator Jeremiah must have been. He 
saw the Jewish state plunging toward the rocks, 
and struggled at the risk of his life to avert the 
doom. Day after day, to the excited thousands 
who crowded the great temple court, in the very 
teeth of the authorities, and in contradiction of all 
the pro-Egyptian statesmen, this intrepid man thun- 
dered his admonitions in the ears of the multitude; 
charged the national calamities on the false prophets ; 
denounced all who contradicted his message as liars 



136 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

and deceivers who were leading the people to their 
ruin; and declared that the very men who rejected 
his counsel and mocked his warnings would fulfil his 
predictions, and be the victims of the judgments he 
denounced. He resembles Demosthenes breasting 
in vain the storm of Philip's invasion of Greece. It 
is a wonderful testimony to the freedom of speech 
in ancient Israel that Jeremiah was allowed to de- 
liver such "Philippics." But the more they at- 
tempted to suppress him, the more outspoken and 
vehement he became. 

What an orator Ezekiel must have been among 
the exiles in Babylon! He possessed one of the 
finest attributes of an orator, a splendid voice. 
People who little heeded his message, delighted to 
hear him speak, and he, doubtless, always had a 
crowd. What a voice Webster had, deep, sonorous, 
far-sounding, matching his massive thought. What 
a voice O'Connor had, far-flung over listening mul- 
titudes, like the boom of the billows of his Irish 
sea. What a voice Beecher had, trumpet-toned, 
thrilling with the electric quality of his thought. 
Beyond them all, what a matchless voice James A. 
Duncan, of Virginia, had ! Melodious as an Eolian 
harp, loud as the boom of the Virginia surf, soft 
as a zephyr, terrible as a tempest, modulated to every 
mood of his mind and distilling into its tones the 
subtle personality of the speaker ! What a modern 
"dervish" he was; for when Duncan spoke I have 
seen the least emotional of men, and men skilled in 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 137 

self-control, "rave" like Saul when he was among 
the prophets. It was not massive thought, or cap- 
tivating manner, or brilliant rhetoric, or even im- 
passioned spirit; but something of all of these con- 
veyed to the ear by a voice of surpassing tones. So 
Ezekiel : "And, lo, thou art unto them as a very 
lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and 
can play well on an instrument : for they hear thy 
words, but do them not." (Ezek. xxxiii, 32.) 

And they were actors as well as speakers. Isaiah 
went bare- footed and wore the garb of a captive to 
emphasise his prediction of the fate of Israel if 
she did not return to God. In the great debate be- 
tween Jeremiah and Hananiah, Jeremiah came on 
the rostrum wearing a little yoke around his neck 
made of limber twigs to symbolise the doom of the 
nation. One of the most dramatic incidents in the 
whole history of oratory, is when Jeremiah made 
his reply to Hananiah, and Hananiah walked up to 
Jeremiah, and in the face of the vast multitude, 
snatched the yoke from Jeremiah's neck, saying: 
"Thus saith the Lord ; even so will I break the yoke 
of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck 
of all nations within the space of two full years." 
Ezekiel seems to have frequently enforced his mes- 
sages by appropriate dramatic action. Moss-back 
sticklers for dignity in the pulpit would have called 
them sensational preachers; and they were! 

Much of the Bible is made up of inspired ora- 



138 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

tory, and in all the annals of eloquence you can find 
nothing equal to the orations of Moses, or the dis- 
courses of Isaiah, the lofty messages of Paul or 
the wondrous words of Jesus. They sweep the wid- 
est ranges of thought, and strike the deepest chords 
of passion, and have left the greatest impress on 
the history of man. The court of Solomon's tem- 
ple in Jerusalem was the arena of a loftier elo- 
quence than was ever heard from the Bema of 
Athens or the Forum in Rome, in British Parlia- 
ment or American Senate. And the fame of the 
orators of Israel is undimmed by the flight of time. 
The voice of Demosthenes — that matchless voice 
that thundered o'er "the fierce democratic" of 
Greece, and shook the throne of Macedon, is silent 
now, and no longer haunts even academic halls 
where once it reigned supreme. The eloquence of 
Cicero, that made the Roman Senate tremble and 
nations stand in awe, has almost faded from the 
memory of man, drowned in the roar of time. But 
the eloquence of the orators of Israel is resound- 
ing through the ages like the deep-toned bells of 
a cathedral, and making music that charms the 
world. Listen to it, and let it be to you like the 
sweet Angelus, at whose sound you uncover your 
head and bow your knee to worship the living God. 

Sixth: The Hebrew prophets were all optimists. 
They all did their work under circumstances of 
profound discouragement. Think of Moses, when 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 139 

by vast patience and immense effort, he brought 
Israel to Kadesh-barnea, on the very borders of 
the land of promise, he saw all his work apparently 
fail, narrowly escaped lynching, and saw "the 
course of time swerve, crook, and turn upon itself" 
in a "backward sweeping curve" that postponed the 
fulfilment of his hopes for forty years; and Elijah, 
who after his great achievement on Mount Carmel, 
had to fly for his life, and find safety in the soli- 
tudes of Horeb; and Isaiah, to whom it was re- 
vealed in the very beginning of his ministry that 
it would not save his people, but harden their 
hearts and aggravate their doom; and Jeremiah, 
who saw the city, into whose very walls all the 
hopes of Israel were built, a desolation and a waste; 
and Daniel and Ezekiel who were captives in a for- 
eign land! Yet they never wavered in their faith. 
Amid all the political confusion of their times, the 
increasing wickedness against which they battled 
so courageously, the crashing of empires, and the 
passing of the world-order around them, they ex- 
claimed: "Clouds and darkness are round about 
him; but righteousness and judgment are the habi- 
tation of his throne" ! 

They believed and taught that through the spread 
of the knowledge of Israel's God, evil would be 
banished from the world, and peace and happiness 
bless mankind. They could not be true to God and 
teach any other doctrine; nor can we, for in the 



140 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

beginning God pronounced the world he had made, 
not only "good," but "very good," the best of all 
possible worlds. The prophets lived and did their 
work in the light of that glorious truth. The world 
was not a failure to them ; or if it was, they looked 
for a "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness. ,, And it was their mission to 
help Almighty God build that new world. 

What a contrast their luminous doctrine presents 
to the gloomy speculations of many of the intel- 
lectual leaders of mankind ! There is nothing more 
tragical in the history of man than to see a great 
mind like that of a Huxley or Haeckel, or Spencer 
or Darwin, or Eucken or Bergson, honest seekers 
after truth, looking out on the universe with keen 
and penetrative vision, and seeing nothing but the 
reign of second causes; bringing field after field 
of nature under the dominion of scientific knowl- 
edge ; discovering matchless order and harmony and 
mechanical perfection everywhere from the atom to 
the planet; extending the boundaries of creation 
until the boldest imagination sinks oppressed with 
the conception of its illimitable vastness; and after 
all unable to find any ultimate end that will explain 
and justify it all; climbing to the heaven of heav- 
ens only to find it an empty void; shouting from 
the pinnacle of creation into "the Sybil Cave of Des- 
tiny," and receiving no answer; following the trail 
of life, with eager scent, only to find it end in an 
abyss of nothingness! It is enough to drive an 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 141 

honest mind to sheer insanity to roam the endless 
mazes of the universe, hear the shriek of its myriad 
suffering creatures, feel the throb of its wide an- 
guish, witness the appalling confusion and cense 
perplexities of human life that exclude all thought 
of a primal goodness, and fail to find God in it 
all ! To see in all this vast creation, with its beauty 
and its grandeur and its far-flung expanse of glory 
from blooming flower to rolling world, nothing but 
a torture chamber, a charnel house, a 



" Vale of death, a hushed Cimerian vale, 
Where darkness brooding o'er unfinished fates 
With raven wing incumbent, buries all in endless night ! " 



Let one of the leading infidels of Germany tell 
us how he regards the universe. It may give us 
a glimpse into the psychological causes of the World 
War and put us on our guard against travelling the 
intellectual road that led Germany to ruin. It ex- 
poses the very heart of that "German Kultur," of 
which we have heard so much, and which is the 
most diabolical and dangerous heresy that ever 
cursed mankind. Two generations ago, Frederic 
Strauss was one of the intellectual leaders of Ger- 
many and his doctrines permeated her thought. 
Strauss said : "The conception of the Cosmos, in- 
stead of a personal God, as the finality to which we 
are led by perception and thought, the ultimate 
reality beyond which we cannot proceed ... as- 
sumes the more definite shape of matter infinitely 



142 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

agitated, which by differentiation and integration 
develops itself to ever higher forms and functions, 
and describes an everlasting circle, by evolution, dis- 
solution, and then fresh evolution." He abolishes 
God and puts matter in his place and gives us a 
meaningless programme for a meaningless universe. 
He boldly accepted the consequences of this stark 
materialism, for he said : "In the enormous machine 
of the universe, amid the incessant whirl and hiss of 
its jagged iron wheels, amid the deafening crash 
of its ponderous stamps and hammers, in the midst 
of this whole terrific commotion, man — a helpless 
and defenceless creature — finds himself placed, not 
secure for a moment that on some imprudent motion 
a wheel may not seize and rend him, or a hammer 
crush him to powder." That is the outlook of Ger- 
man "Kultur" on the world! 

Men with the blunted moral sensibilities of the 
infidel may contemplate such a universe with com- 
posure ; but as Carlyle said : "It is clear that to pure 
moral nature, the loss of religious belief is the 
loss of everything." Life is not worth living in 
such a universe, and there is no wonder, to quote 
Carlyle again, that men who have no faith in God 
"puke up their sick existence by suicide." So dark 
and dismal, so meaningless and hopeless, did it all 
appear to the great English scientist, Huxley, that 
he said unless something could be done to improve 
it, collision with a friendly comet that would anni- 
hilate it would be a welcome ending to the infinite 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 143 

farce! Huxley was right. Creation, without re- 
demption, is an infinite failure, and the highest act 
of a merciful God would be to blot it out of ex- 
istence. Take Christ out of the world, and it is 
tragedy from the insect up to man. 

But something had been done to improve it, and 
these Hebrew prophets had caught the beatific vi- 
sion of redemption! They started to reason about 
the universe from the basic conception of a personal 
God, an infinite Mind, as the first cause of all things ; 
the absolute, primal, and unconditioned ground of 
all being, which is the fundamental and necessary 
pre-supposition of all rational thought. They, too, 
climbed to the heaven of heavens, and found it the 
abode of the living God, and all too small to con- 
tain his glory. They, too, stood at the "Sybil Cave 
of Destiny," and shouted into the primeval silence 
their question as to the origin, aim, and end of all 
things; and there came back from its mysterious 
depths the glorious affirmation of Christian faith, 
the everlasting postulate of Reason : "In the begin- 
ning God"! They, too, followed the trail of life 
through the labyrinthine maze, and it brought them 
out upon a mount of vision from which they saw 
"the new heavens and the new earth," reposing in 
the peace and bliss of God ! What was the source 
of this optimism? What was it that enabled them 
to solve the riddle of the moral world that has puz- 
zled the philosophers of all ages ? While it was the 
legitimate inference from the primal doctrine re- 



144 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

vealed in the beginning that the world is "good," 
their faith rested on more definite foundations. In 
their exalted, unique, and divine relation to human- 
ity; in the amplitude and spiritual significance of 
their office; and in the purport and moral grandeur 
of the ethical system with which they are forever 
identified, the Hebrew prophets were the fore- 
runners of Christ. The halo around them was a 
reflection of the beams from the Sun of Righteous- 
ness. They were forward-looking men because they 
had something to look forward to! 

The modern theory of the prophets eliminates the 
Messianic element from their thought. According 
to this theory, they were for a long time little bet- 
ter than heathen dervishes; but gradually, by per- 
fectly natural processes of moral improvement, they 
emerged from this primitive state, and became he- 
roic preachers of righteousness, with social mes- 
sages for their times. That is all. But the New 
Testament tells a very different story. According 
to the New Testament, which some of us are not 
going to believe, are charming myths about a 
"lovely peasant," who became "the symbol of the 
worlds highest idealism," the Spirit of Christ was 
in the Hebrew prophets. They understood it that 
way, and in moments of rare spiritual exaltation, 
as they stood on the shining hill-tops of prophecy, 
they became conscious of the ulterior and supreme 
significance of their mission and their message, as 
when David exclaimed : "I will declare the decree : 



THE HEBREW PROPHETS 145 

the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; 
this have I begotten thee"; and Isaiah, when he 
broke into the rapturous proclamation: "Unto us 
a child is born; unto us a son is given. And the 
government shall be upon his shoulder. And his 
name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The 
Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince 
of Peace. Of the increase of his government and 
peace there shall be no end; upon the throne of 
David and upon his kingdom, to order and to es- 
tablish it with judgment and with justice from 
henceforth even forever. The zeal of the Lord of 
hosts shall perform this!" Micah caught a glimpse 
of the meaning of it all, saw behind the scenes, and 
exclaimed : "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though 
thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out 
of thee shall he come forth unto me who is to be 
ruler in Israel, whose goings forth have been from 
of old, from everlasting!" 

In short, this world was not a failure to the 
Hebrew prophets. They could work in the dark- 
ness because they believed the day would dawn. 
They did not reach this rational conception of the 
world by the intellectual process of human reason 
and never framed it into a philosophy. It was re- 
vealed to them by the Holy Spirit, and was the 
necessary background and underlying foundation of 
all their messages. It is this theistic conception of 
the world, unfolding the inner purpose of God in 
human history, a conception implicit in the very 



146 MODERN THEORY OF THE BIBLE 

dawn of prophecy, that distinguishes the Hebrew 
prophets from all other religious teachers of man- 
kind and makes it forever impossible to class them 
at any period of their history with the heathen 
dervishes. This spiritual knowledge and clear per- 
ception of the moral constitution of the world, and 
the inflexible fidelity with which they proclaimed 
the truth, clothe these Hebrew orators with unpar- 
alleled dignity and power, and lift them into com- 
manding importance in the history of the race of 
man. 

The Hebrew Prophets! Salute them with un- 
covered head. Illustrious men, they pass before 
us in the august pageant of history, robed in man- 
tles of light. Venerable teachers, whose wisdom 
the ages have verified and whose predictions time 
has fulfilled! Inspired pilots, who steered human- 
ity safely through the seething seas of time toward 
the port of heaven ! Beacon lights of history, whose 
torches, blazing with celestial truth, led the Church 
of the living God through the wilderness of heathen- 
ism to the broad and glorious day of Christ. Ada- 
mantine pillars on whose faith, and veracity, and 
dauntless courage, Almighty God built his king- 
dom in the world ; and who, with the Apostles, are 
the foundation on which we stand to-day, "J esus 
Christ, Himself, being the chief corner stone." 



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